Re: what do these names stand for

On Fri, 30 Dec 2005 15:51:39 -0500, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:

>>>> /usr
>>> Nobody's sure where the "user" reference came from.
>> Files were chosen to be placed in "/usr" iff they were needed after the
>> system went multi-user.
> It... gets even weirder if you look at history. Many modern systems
> symlink /bin to /usr/bin. And the old "dump" and "restore" programs were
> stashed in "/etc", because /etc was one of the really critical bits to run
> a UNIX-style /usr was often another partition, for performance reasons and
> managing backup, when backup was done with software that talked to your
> disk directly like "dump" and "restore".

Yup.

Historical (hysterical?) note for all you newbies:

My first hard disk was an IBM 2315 with 512Kbytes of storage and held
all of the O/S, compilers and tools, applications, and their data. I
still have it.

A 10M drive was something that only universities and Boeing would have.

Odd to think these days, the video card's refresh RAM is larger than
my first machine, including main and backing store. I've never tried
to run a payroll application out of the video RAM though.

Those were the days when men were men and a master programmer spent
days trying to squeeze another byte or two out of a snippet of code.
Assembly code, that is.

I remember that the sole justification for having subroutines was to
hold code you might need to use in more than one place in the
program: code a subroutine and avoid duplicating the source code.
Now, cut'n paste is the norm again. Go figure.

Cheers
.

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