From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: wkt@tuhs.org (Warren Toomey)
Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2016 15:11:03 +1000
Subject: [TUHS] Early non-Unix filesystems?
In-Reply-To: <20160318035936.GF16894@mercury.ccil.org>
References: <20160318004832.GA18245@minnie.tuhs.org>
 <20160318035936.GF16894@mercury.ccil.org>
Message-ID: <20160318051103.GA4419@minnie.tuhs.org>

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 11:59:36PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> There was also no concept of pathnames in PDP-7 Unix, neither relative
> nor absolute.  ...
> directory, conventionally named "bin", and the shell could not execute
> commands out of a directory that did not contain a "bin" link.

Are you sure it was called "bin"? The PDP-7 team are working on the
assumption that it was called "system" because init links the shell
from "system" into a user's home directory:

   sys setuid		" Set the user's user-id,
   sys chdir; dd	" change into the "dd" directory
   sys chdir; dir	" and then into the user's directory
   ...
   sys link; system; sh; sh	" Link sh in system dir to this dir
system:
   ...
   <sy>;<st>;<em>; 040040

https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix/blob/master/src/cmd/init.s

There's no mention of the directory's name in the kernel, but i-node 3
has to contain init (we assume "system" again) and i-node 4 is the
directory that holds users' home directories ("dd").

Cheers, Warren