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The original split was because the disks on Ken and Dennis' PDP11 were too small to hold the entire operating system. The solution was to put enough bits on the first disk to allow it to find and mount the second disk.

I think it's safe to say this particular reason isn't as relevant today as it was 40 years ago.

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Another benefit from the split continuing was the smaller the root filesystem, the bare bones needed to get up and running, the less chance of filesystem or data corruption occurring. This meant your had a bootable system with which to repair the other bigger filesystems instead of having to boot from tape.

Yep. But I think that was just a fortuitous side effect, not the original reason for the split.

Agreed, I tried to get that across with the "split continuing" bit. :-)

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