Planning your SCO XENIX System V Ver. 2.3 disk layout

Preface

It is the year 1988. You are holding in your hand installation media for an operating system called XENIX, version 2.3, for your 386-based computer. It comes with an installation manual. On paper, of course, as installation manuals would come back in those days. Helpfully, it provides some guidance on how to plan your disk layout. Albeit the original text is profoundly beautiful in the way only dense technical writing set in 10 pt. Times in book format can be, copyright once more gets in my way of reproducing it here.

To summarize, the manual suggests that you may have a separate /u filesystem if you have a hard disk or partition. It touts the advantages thereof:

1. Having it may simplify system backups by being able to save on space because there are less files to back up on the other filesystems.
2. There are speed benefits to small filesystems because smaller filesystems have less inodes and therefore require fewer searching operations through indirection.
3. If the system crashes, it is more likely to survive without corruption by reducing activity on the root filesystem.

But it also cautions that there is no way to resize filesystems, so some flexibility is lost with a separate /u filesystem and there is some additional complexity introduced to system administration by having a separate filesystem.

At the end of the section about planning your disk layout, it helpfully provides a worksheet for you to work through. Considering that it is paper, it is also effectively single-use. For no reason other than hilariously concentrated autism, I will be reproducing it here with an online calculator written in ungodly JavaScript. However, to preserve the authentic feeling of paper, I am also giving you the option of printing it. This preface will disappear in print mode, leaving only the worksheets.

I had to take some minor creative liberties with the table, namely always displaying the units. On paper, you would always write the units down, but for the sake of clarity, I added them everywhere.