history of homedirs on unices

This is actually a matter mostly of partitioning. On a system with a small number of spindles, "/usr" was usually the largest

and most users had their home directories there (this tradition

with many commercial Unices). On a system with a large number of users and spindles, very often there were multiple root directories used for home directories. For example there would be a disk mounted as /users1 and it would have user's home directories of /users1/aaron and /users1/able and /users1/acton etc., and then there would be a disk mounted as /users2 and it would have a bunch of home directories on it, etc. Other places would mount these as /usr/users1/aaron, /usr/users1/able, etc., keeping up the tradition of having them under the "/usr"

Sometimes all the disparate spindles were hidden by making links from a common /usr/users or /users directory to the spindle/directory where the home directory really resided. This is much nicer if you're gonna be migrating to larger disks someday. Many of the inconvenient things of spindles and mount points we no longer do if not necessary. I suppose /home is a good point to start at and then if necessary use link to the actually partition where the user's home directory resides. For some reason, the old way of partitioning unix systems still lives on although the need for multiple mount points and spindles doesn't matter much in a world of multi-hundred-Gbyte disks. I suppose it's like "always make your swap partition twice the size of physical memory" even though the rationale behind that recommendation was stale 15 years ago and is much more stale today!