Wow, this title suffers from some serious editorializing. What's next, "10 ways to know if you are a hacker? (cracked.com)"

Wow. As someone who was there (I know dating my self here) reading this is kind of like that scene in Sleeper where the person from the future is trying to understand artifacts from the past.

So during the BSD / System V merge (project Lulu at Sun) the /opt filesystem was introduced as a way to keep 'packages' separate from 'system'. The difference between /bin and /sbin was that sbin was 'static-bin' which is to say everything in it was statically linked and could run without any libraries being available.

The fact that Linux starts up differently is because Linux never was UNIX they are two different OSes, pretty much from the ground up. They use similar concepts, processes, file descriptors, Etc, but they are two different species. FreeBSD on the other hand is a derivative of UNIX and last time I checked it started up in a similar way.

The lack of space on the RK05s was indeed the reason for the addition of /usr/{lib, bin} and the general consensus at Sun and AT&T in the 80's was that the root file system contained the system, and the /usr file system contained stuff that was not-system.

AT&T (the guys that 'owned' UNIX) had some pretty detailed specifications about what lived in what directory and why. It was a "BigDeal" (tm) to add a new directory in the root file system so new directories, when they were proposed, appeared under /usr. And once /opt existed it gave people free reign to create their own trees. Early package managers would build /opt/<package>/{bin/lib/share/man} and the downside was that ones path variable got longer and longer, and there arguments about if there should be more constraints on opt.

Your new designer will be able to have a crack at an original homepage ;)

http://i.imgur.com/fRI8Q.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/KbQo0.jpg