I vaguely recall that the system was supposed to run if /usr/bin wasn't mounted.

There was, obviously, a big difference in criticality between, say, sh and ed vs. troff and... everything I ever did.

--Marc

On Fri, Dec 23, 2016 at 11:52 AM, Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> So was "/usr/bin" initially only for user-contributed binaries, or was
it from its inception a place for binaries that were not essential for
system boot and could not fit in the root partition?

The latter is my understanding, but early on the two
interpretations would have been nearly coextensive.
Remember, though, that even Ken wrote some "user-contributed"
code.

Doug