Introduction to The Unix Philosophy

An operating system is a living, breathing software entity. The soul of the computing machine, it is the nervous system that turns electrons and silicon into a personality. It brings life to the computer.

An operating system, by its nature, embodies the philosophy of its creators. The Apple Mac/OS, with its highly visual, object-oriented user interface, proclaims "it's right there in front of you." Microsoft's MS-DOS, the undisputed leader of the personal computer revolution, tries to bring "a taste of the mainframe" to the desktop. Digital Equipment Corporation's OpenVMS assumes that the user fears the electronic thinking machine and must be given only a few powerful choices to accomplish a task.

The creators of the Unix operating system started with a radical concept: They assumed that the user of their software would be computer literate from the start. The entire Unix philosophy revolves around the idea that the user knows what he is doing. While other operating system designers take great pains to accommodate the breadth of users from novice to expert, the designers of Unix took an inhospitable "if you can't understand it, you don't belong here" kind of approach.

It was precisely this attitude that prevented Unix from gaining wide acceptance early. It was confined to the back room where academics studied it because of the intoxicating fumes it brought to the ivory towers ("The parallels one can draw between the Unix file system hierarchy and the natural order of things bears careful intellectual scrutiny") and "techies" tinkered with it because it gave them more ways to play than any other system before it.

Alas, the commercial world could see no value in it. It was a hacker's toy, a curiosity. Few profitable enterprises would dare risk their investment returns on an operating system that came from a research lab, was nurtured in universities, and was self-supported by the purchaser. As a result, Unix languished for more than 15 years as an unsung hero.

Then an amazing thing happened in the early 1980's. Rumors began to circulate that there was an operating system that provided more flexibility, more portability, and more capability than whatever it was that people where currently using. Furthermore, it was universally available at very little cost and it could run on just about anyone's machine.

The message of Unix sounded nearly too good to be true, but history has a way of proving that we often shoot the messenger. Whenever any radical idea comes along that seriously alters our view of the world, our natural tendency is to bash the bearer of new tidings. As far as anyone in the computing mainstream could see, these "Unix fanatics" were not interested in evolution - they were talking revolution.

As Unix began to infiltrate the computing world, evidently many in today's corporate bureaucracies abhorred the thought of revolution. They preferred their ordered world on PC's and mainframes, secure in the belief that job security came from knowing the simple commands that they'd struggled to learn and use in their daily tasks. Unix became The Enemy, not so much because it was intrinsically evil, but because it threatened the status quo.

For years Unix pioneers lived in relative obscurity. Support for their radical ideas was nowhere to be found. Even when some sympathetic soul would listen to the tirades of the local Unix advocate, the response would usually be "Unix is okay, but if you want to do anything serious, you should probably use __________." (Fill the blank with the name of your favorite mainstream operating system.) Still, operating system philosophies are like religions. When someone has it in their head that they have found The Truth, they're not willing to let it go that easily. So the Unix apostles pressed on, doggedly upholding the standard, believing that someday the world would be converted and they would see software paradise.

While the commercial world was busy building barriers to Unix, the academic world was welcoming Unix with open arms. A generation of young people raised in houses with color TV's, microwave ovens, and video games was entering universities that had obtained Unix for the cost of the magnetic media on which it was distributed. These young people had clean canvases for minds and the professors were more than willing to paint on them a picture of computing far removed from the mainstream.

The rest is history.

Today Unix is rapidly gaining acceptance in situations where it once would have been considered unthinkable. It is the undisputed system of choice in the academic world, and its applications in the military and commercial worlds are expanding daily.

I have been telling people for years that it is only a matter of time before Unix becomes the world's operating system. I have yet to be proven wrong. Ironically, however, the world's operating system will not be called "Unix," for as companies have realized the value of the name, their lawyers have rushed to register its trademark. As a result, interfaces will be designed, standards will be proposed, and many applications will be written in the name of "open systems." Rest assured, though, that the Unix philosophy will be the driving force behind them all.