(very OT) Ideal partition schemes (history of partitioning)

[Aryeh Friedman]

When installing another OS then FreeBSD (won't state which one to avoid
flame wars) I noticed it's default partitioning scheme breaks the main (and
only) drive on the system down into 50 GB chunks (in my case / and /home)
by default (I over road to FreeBSD's default of one big partition for the
whole drive [minus swap]).

I was wondering what people think of different generalized partitioning
schemes? (there is no right answer here but I might question your comments)

Also why are partitioned need at all? (both currently and historically)

-- 
Aryeh M. Friedman, Lead Developer, http://www.PetiteCloud.org