Neal Stephenson's analogy from 'In the Beginning was the Command Line' is pretty good:

"Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.

What made old epics like Gilgamesh so powerful and so long-lived was that they were living bodies of narrative that many people knew by heart, and told over and over again--making their own personal embellishments whenever it struck their fancy. The bad embellishments were shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. Likewise, Unix is known, loved, and understood by so many hackers that it can be re-created from scratch whenever someone needs it."

Here's one from the book The Art of UNIX Programming[0]: "The Unix philosophy is bottom-up and not top-down. It is pragmatic and grounded in experience."

[0] http://www.amazon.com/UNIX-Programming-Addison-Wesley-Profes...

That book - TAOUP - is quite good, though written in ESR's typical style (somewhat heavy and maybe overuse of relatively complex and less-used words).

One concept or principle mentioned in the book - the X Windows concept - of "provide mechanism, not policy" [1] - is, IMO, one of the reasons for Unix's longevity and success, even as it has morphed through various versions - from the original Bell Labs ones through Sun, HP, IBM's versions, and then Linux, the BSDs, etc., and up to Android and Mac OS X and iOS. I commented somewhere recently on a blog post about this.

[1] To make it clear, the principle name is slightly misleading. It does not mean "don't provide at all". It just means, let the lower layers of a software stack (such as X Windows) provide only the mechanism, and leave it to higher layers (such as, say, KDE or GNOME), to decide the policy.

Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_mechanism_and_po...

Predating those two are:

UNIX as literature http://theody.net/elements.html

Life with UNIX by Don Libes http://minnie.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Books/Life_with... (from the author's website)

I'm only part way through the 1st chapter but the Don Libes book is quite good. Having been written in 1989 it's an interesting perspective of Unix before Linux.

Thanks for sharing!

Started reading the Don Libes book, good stuff, brings back memories of my Unix work / days; thanks for sharing.

> "The Unix philosophy is bottom-up and not top-down. It is pragmatic and grounded in experience."

Something that seems to be lost on a solid portion of the current custodians of that legacy...

Unix history certainly has aspects of the "grandfather's axe". Few users of unixoid systems today are running original 70ies Unix code.

But Unix is not just code. The concepts introduced by Unix - or at least the flavor given to certain concepts - lives on to this day. Basically all of the userspace-kernel interface, the system calls, are still there and work in largely the same way. These concepts and interfaces are parts of the axe too and they haven't been replaced.

C is the language of the virtual machine know as Unix.

I think being a Unix is analogous to being a member of the set of axes, rather than any specific unix implementation or install, which would be equivalent to a specific axe.

"... Unix is not just an operating system, but also a style of approaching problems."

[0] http://catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/returning.html

"The API is more important than the implementation." If you extend the definition of API to include things like standard command line tools, etc

If I'm not mistaken there's still a lot of the original Unix code in the BSD distros, but I haven't studied it enough to be sure of that.

Not sure about "original" as in AT&T, but certainly lots of files going back to the 80's and 90's. Lots of Sun's legacy to be found.