The world Unix made

Unix is the nearest common ancestor of modern computing.

The defining trait of the Unix paradigm is Text as the Universal Substrate.

Before Unix, files were rigid containers. You specified their size and structure at creation time — and were locked in. Unix made files formatless. And it bet on text as the universal interface.

This decision created the lingua franca of computing.

• Configuration is text.
• Code is text.
• The Web (HTML) is text.
• Data interchange (JSON) is text.
• APIs speak text.
• Humans can read text.

This paradigm conquered the world. The cloud runs on it. The mobile world (iOS and Android) runs on it. macOS runs on it. Even Windows adopted the Unix file paradigm (hierarchical byte streams) early in its history.

Unix is not the genetic ancestor of all modern systems (though it is that for many), but it is the spiritual ancestor: Unix built the civilization that all modern computing lives within.

2025-11-20

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