> Joe wrote: > > There was a time when 'software' and 'applications' were two different > > and distinct things, when applications were user programs and software > > was the set of programs that made the computer work, today called system > > software. A computer as delivered contained both hardware and software, > > and it was up to the owner to write the applications. OK, that's going > > back a bit... > > > Once upon a time there were programmers. Frequently they had to > build the hardware that they programmed -- indeed, it was a bit > of a luxury to only be a programmer, and not also have > responsibility for hardware maintenance (or design). > > Then there were systems programmers and application programmers. > Systems programmers wrote operating systems and utilities for > them. Applications programmers wrote applications. There was a lot of crossover. > > Then there were operators, systems programmers and application > programmers. Operator was a junior position that did physical > things (mount tapes, plug in cables) and ran commands to do > things on the systems. They usually moved up to being -- > > Systems administrators, who did some programming in service to > the systems, but not too much. The more senior a sysadmin was, > the more time they spent programming and the less time they > spent doing physical things, unless they wanted to do that. > > Sysadmins started to specialize. People who configured switches > and routers and talked to telephone companies became > "network engineers". People who spent time working on > firewalls and security policies and thinking about that became > "security engineers". Junior people who read scripts to > end users became the helpdesk. And so forth. > > Then we noticed that a bunch of people were doing things > manually when they should be automated. This was especially bad > in places where there were no senior sysadmins or systems > programmers. But we did have the internet, and senior sysadmins > got together and started writing tools to make their lives > easier: infrastructure automation. Current tools for that > include chef, puppet, ansible, salt... > > (all of this is largely quoting myself circa April 2016) > > -dsr-
Wow, it is very impressive how things evolve. Since this thread is about this filesystem hierarchy debate, I would like to add this post I just read: http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html Looks like Wikipedia is right: many years ago, /usr meant "user", and there was no /home
