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    At the time /usr was coined, its meaning was user and home directories were located there. unix/universal system resource is actually a backronym. Commented Mar 6, 2011 at 14:33
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    @jlliagre Awesome. I found another thread that actually has an authoritative source of that. us.generation-nt.com/answer/… Commented Mar 6, 2011 at 16:01
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    Most early C programmers were first FORTRAN programmers. The way you typed integers in Fortran IV was to start the identifier with a character from 'i' to 'n', everything else was a REAL number. Thus loop indices were typically i, j, or k; which was sufficient for the matrices we scientific programmers were mangling back then. Commented Apr 5, 2011 at 5:56
  • @TomMurphy, most people who started with C were probably assembly language programmers, or perhaps BCPL or B users. RATFOR was invented for the poor souls who didn't have a decent language at hand. And the Kernighan and Plaugher book "Software tools" was written in (and lists a full preprocessor for) RATFOR. Still very much worth a read. Commented Mar 18, 2013 at 17:09
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    /usr wasn't "Universal System Resources", it really was user. See Youtube: AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System (produced around 1982) where, at about 13min 35sec, /usr/bwk is clearly pronounced "user-b-w-k" and /usr is pronounced "slash-user" by Brian W. Kernighan. /usr is also clearly implied to be the location containing home directories in the diagram at 13min 30sec. I don't think you can get much more authoritative than that. Commented Apr 22, 2017 at 12:09