Sep 19, 2026 · Fundamentals

bin: A 1971 1.5MB Disk Crisis

The split between /bin and /usr/bin originated in 1971 when Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie ran out of space on a 1.5MB PDP-11 disk, prompting them to spill overflow commands onto a second disk mounted at /usr—a pragmatic hack later mythologized as intentional design, causing decades of confusion until modern distributions merged them via usrmerge.

Dennis RitchieKen ThompsonLinux

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Why Linux Has /bin and /usr/bin: A 1971 1.5MB Disk Crisis

Machine Heart

Apr 14, 2026 · Artificial Intelligence

Training a Transformer on a 1970s PDP‑11 Takes Only 5.5 Minutes

A developer recreated a 1970s PDP‑11 environment, wrote a single‑layer, single‑head Transformer in assembly, and trained it on a sequence‑reversal task, achieving 100% accuracy after about 350 steps and a total training time of roughly 5.5 minutes.

Low-resource AIPDP-11Sequence reversal

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Training a Transformer on a 1970s PDP‑11 Takes Only 5.5 Minutes