--On Friday, October 14, 2005 1:34 AM +1000 Anthony Shipman
<als@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Historically it does way back, to the 70s when disks were slow and
expensive and removable disk packs were good for the biceps.
The root file system was small but fast. It contained enough to get the
system running. The commonly-used commands were there in /bin for speed.
Then if you were rich you could add on a larger but slow disk drive and
mount it on /usr.
I think you're confusing mount points with partitions. Having multiple
mount points pointing at different media has the property you describe.
I suspect partitions are an outgrowth of the mainframe world, when
different processes could "own" physical tracks. In the microcomputer
world, it most likely was a result of the plethora of early OS's and the
desire to be able to dynamically choose which to boot.
