27 Sep
2018
27 Sep
'18
5:20 p.m.
Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
At some point, the "user's directory"
as denoted in /etc/passwd became
known as the "home directory." If that was common vernacular by the time
that `/home` came around as a convention, then it seems a logical name
stemming from that usage.
It most definitely was common usage before /home came along.
As I recall it, in the System V Release 4 time frame, AT&T, Sun, DEC and
UCB agreed on the division of things into /home, /usr, and /var, with
the impetus being that /usr could be mounted read-only from a single file
server (saving many copies of the same files), /home mounted read-write
(or automounted) and /var holding things that were peculiar to each
system but read-write, such as log files and temporary files.
Diskless workstations, or workstations with very small disks for
holding the root filesystem only, were very popular at the time.
Arnold