3 Feb
2012
3 Feb
'12
10:06 p.m.
On Feb 3, 2012, at 10:22 AM, Jose R. Valverde wrote:
There was a reason to separate user data from system data to avoid
the system disk from becoming unusable by a misbehaving user.
But this wasn't practically done in the early UNIX. Even much that was in /usr was
required for normal system operation and there was stuff that got left on the root that
was within the user's ability to hose up. I was system administrator of a V6 UNIX
that was used in a University setting in the late 70's. People banging on the disks
was the least of my issues. There were far more fun ways to crash UNIX (and even
PDP-11's in general), break security, etc... that I ran around trying to forestall.
In fact our /usr was on the root disk. We had two "user" home directory drives
/sys1 and /sys2 on two more RK05's. My first quota as a student was 8 blocks (4K).
I supplemented that at first with a dectape (half a megabyte) and then with my own RK05
pack (we reserved two drives for user mounted volumes).
We swapped to an RF11 fixed head disk of about a megabyte.
The fun one was people trying to ascribe meanings to the "acronyms" on the
kernel disk (KEN and DMR).