Strategy for /tmp and /home Partitioning

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Friday, October 14, 2005 1:34 AM +1000 Anthony Shipman 
<als at iinet.net.au> 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.