Unix is both a technology and an idea

August 20, 2023

The thing we call Unix is both a technology (really a set of them)
and an idea (really a set of them). Of course the two sides aren’t
unrelated to each other; in Research Unix through V7, clearly two mutually reinforced each other,
with the technology being developed to support the ideas and also,
I think, with the technology enabling some further ideas. However,
even historically the two were not glued together. People took the
Unix ideas and implemented them on other systems (that was part of
what made Unix so powerful as an agent of change and a source of
ideas), and even in the 1970s and 1980s other people took the
technology and used it in contexts where the ideas were not really
expressed or exposed.

The ideas of Unix are not just about how things work; they’re also
about how people should interact with the system. For example,
consider Rob Pike’s thread about the