Symlinks?   Surely  you jest.   Not in Version 7 or System V.

The idea was to keep root small for convenience in various stages of setup.   /usr was indeed intended to be a separate disk.   If you look at the early distributions like V7, you’ll find the /usr image was a separate tape file.

> On Sep 27, 2018, at 9:54 AM, John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> More opinion, unencumbered by facts. /usr contained many sudirectories, like /usr/bin and /usr/lib, that were essential to an operational OS. Home directories, on the other hand, persisted unchanged when new releases of an OS were installed. Some of us had symlinks from /usr into a separate file system to make the distinction easier to maintain across releases.
> 
> On Thu, Sep 27, 2018 at 8:58 AM, Donald ODona <mutiny.mutiny@india.com <mailto:mutiny.mutiny@india.com>> wrote:
> At 27 Sep 2018 12:11:15 +0000 (+00:00) from "Cág" <ca6c@bitmessage.ch <mailto:ca6c@bitmessage.ch>>:
> > Hi,
> >
> Also, what was the
> > rationale of moving the directory to /home?
> originally /usr, placed on a separate disk, was what became /home much later. Then disk space of / was running out and more an more applications and libs were moved to the /usr device.
> Much later in the 80ths much more disk space was available and a separate /home was created. Exacly when I don't know, but there was no /home in Ed. 7 but System V release 3 had it already.
>