Author: Bryan Cockfield / Source: Hackaday
The Unix operating system has been around for decades, and it and its lookalikes (mainly Linux) are a critical part of the computing world. Apple’s operating system, macOS, is Unix-based, as are Solaris and BSD. Even if you’ve never directly used one of these operating systems, at least two-thirds of all websites are served by Unix or Unix-like software.
And, if you’ve ever picked up a smart phone, chances are it was running either a Unix variant or the Linux-driven Android. The core reason that Unix has been so ubiquitous isn’t its accessibility, or cost, or user interface design, although these things helped. The root cause of its success is its design philosophy.Good design is crucial for success. Whether that’s good design of a piece of software, infrastructure like a railroad or power grid, or even something relatively simple like a flag, without good design your project is essentially doomed. Although you might be able to build a workable one-off electronics project that’s a rat’s nest of wires, or a prototype of something that gets the job done but isn’t user-friendly or scalable, for a large-scale project a set of good design principles from the start is key.
As for Unix, its creators set up a design philosophy based around simplicity from the very beginning. The software was built around a few guiding principles that were easy to understand and implement. First, specific pieces of software should be built to and do that one thing well. Second, the programs should be able to work together effortlessly, meaning inputs and outputs are usually text. With those two simple ideas, computing became less complicated and more accessible, leading to a boom in computer science and general purpose computing in the 1970s and 80s.
These core principles made Unix a major influence on computing in its early days. Unix popularized the idea of software as tools, and the idea that having lots of tools and toolsets around to build other software is much easier and intuitive than writing huge standalone programs that reinvent the wheel on every implementation. Indeed, at the time Unix came around, a lot of other computer researchers were building single-purpose, one-off monolithic blocks of software for specific computers. When Unix was first implemented it blew this model out of the water.
Because of its design, Unix was able to run easily (for the time) on many different computers, and those computers themselves could be less expensive and less resource-intensive. It was known for being interactive…
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