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Subject: Re: [TUHS] The origin of /home
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Dan Cross <crossd@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