

Dennis Ritchie's home directory on 1979 Bell V7 Unix was in /usr/ not /home/ - mappu
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Version_7_Unix_SIMH_PDP11_Emulation_DMR.png

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greenyoda
And so was mine, and so was everyone else's. /usr was the standard place for
users' home directories back then. /home didn't appear until some later
version of Unix.

~~~
mappu
Fascinating, i never realized. I guess sysadmins took other precautions to
ensure nobody had a username of 'bin' or 'lib'? There's a man page for hier(7)
in V7 but it doesn't mention home directories at all.

~~~
greenyoda
In V7, creating a new user was a manual process - there was no program to do
it automatically like there is today. You had to do su, mkdir /usr/dmr, ed
/etc/passwd (creating an ID with initially no password), chown dmr /usr/dmr,
etc. Whoever had the root password would have definitely known that /usr/bin
was an existing directory and not tried to create a user called "bin". Of
course, you could create user directories on separately mounted file systems
as well if you didn't have a lot of space on /usr.

