A bit of trivia: what does usr stand for?

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Saturday, 20 December 2003 at 17:56:20 -0600, Kevin D. Kinsey, DaleCo, S.P. wrote:
> Colin Percival wrote:
>> At 18:04 20/12/2003 -0500, Bill Moran wrote:
>>> Colin Percival wrote:
>>>> There's an urban myth floating around that it meant Unix System
>>> Resource.
>>>
>>>> According to denizens of afc, this is likely a backronym, since the
>>>> first
>>>> use of /usr/ was to store user's files.
>>>
>>> The urban myth is believeable, though, since it seems silly to
>>> abbreviate "user" with "usr" ... I mean, you're only saving 1
>>> letter.
>>
>> The same could be said about /tmp.  I suspect it has less to do
>> with abbreviation, and more to do with someone having a broken "e"
>> key on their keyboard. ;)
>
> UNIX is a tad famous for "lazy typists"; Ritchie has been quoted (I
> think) as saying Thompson had a grand penchant for brevity or
> sparseness.
>
> Could it be related to storage issues?  Three chars and a slash
> isn't a biggie anymore, but back then, ??  Somebody smarter than me
> might know....

I suspect you've never used a teletype.  It's a pain to use, slow and
clunky.  Each keystroke is a separate effort.  Under those
circumstances, saving on input is an advantage.

File names were 14 characters long, pretty much from the beginning, so
I don't think it has anything to do with that.

Greg
--
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-chat/attachments/20031221/00674f32/attachment.bin