It all started going downhill when people changed /u back to /usr ... Us lazy bastards at Berkeley had changed AT&T's /usr to /u in the name of brevity, but apparently it made things hard to understand for newbies.
/u (or /usr) always had non-home directories & other stuff in it ... Source code, documentation, the man pages, user installed binaries available to everybody, and other useful tat like vi, EMACS, UUCP and the BSD games pack.
It was both useful and logical to split it into /usr and /user when the system grew large enough, and had many users. Then some bright spark decided that /usr and /user was too complicated due to their similarity, and thus /user became /home ... except in the appleverse, where they "simplified" it to /Users (Caps in a system directory name? WTF‽‽‽).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
