Learning some arcane and challenging things is necessary to be truly literate in a topic, even if it seems a little outdated. For instance, many scholars say you can’t truly be literate in the Western canon without a knowledge of Latin.
Likewise, I would argue that you can’t be truly computer literate without at least a basic understanding of Unix. And you can’t be sovereign in a field without being literate, so you can’t be digitally sovereign without knowing Unix.
Some variants of Unix run most of the world’s servers, like the web server you’re reading this article on now. Unix is at the heart of Google’s search engine. If you’ve ever used an Android phone or an iPhone, you have unwittingly used a spinoff of Unix.
What is Unix?
But what is Unix? That can be tough to answer since, like a Portuguese man o' war, Unix isn’t a single, definable thing but a collection of things. Part of the Unix philosophy is to have a collection of small, modular, highly specialized bits of software that all work together.
At the heart of Unix is what’s known as the kernel, which is the very low-level software that runs the computer hardware. On top of that are the apps and utilities that you, the user, actually interact with. The kernel is Unix. The software that runs on top of the kernel is also Unix.
Unix was initially developed inside Bell Labs in the 1960s by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, but it escaped the clutches of AT&T to create innumerable offshoots and offshoots of offshoots, all of which can collectively be referred to as Unix.
When Apple fired Steve Jobs in 1985, he founded a new company called NeXT that produced an operating system called NeXTSTEP based on — you guessed it — Unix. When Apple purchased NeXT in 1996, bringing Steve Jobs back into the fold, the company rebuilt Mac OS from NeXTSTEP, keeping the UNIX underpinnings. What was then known as Mac OS X was later refactored to power the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple TV, the Apple Watch, ad infinitum. Apple’s entire product line is built around Unix in some form.
Linux and the open-source revolution
Perhaps the most significant Unix spinoff, called Linux, was created by Finnish developer Linus Torvalds in 1991. What made Linux novel was its open-source philosophy. Linux was totally free to download and share. What it lacked in usability or technical support, it more than made up for by the simple fact that it was free.
Linux will never be a significant player on most ordinary people’s desktops. Something as simple as installing a printer can be a nightmare. But despite that, Linux’s free nature makes it the most ubiquitous operating system in the world. It’s an economical solution for giant server farms running thousands of servers. It’s flexible and cheap enough to deploy, running many small gadgets around your house.
The power of Unix
Stripped of its shiny commercial veneers, Unix is all about raw power. It’s fundamentally a command-line operating system by and for computer geeks. It’s a construction zone littered with tools, scaffolding, and power cords. Unix does not hold your hand and it does not suffer fools. With the right commands, it will happily let you destroy your entire hard drive without so much as an error message.
However, for those brave enough to conquer it, Unix holds unlimited power. And that power has been wielded by some of the most powerful men in the world, like Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin.
If you truly want to be the master of your digital destiny, you must venture into the dark depths of Unix.
How to try Unix
Running Unix on your computer once meant a difficult and treacherous Linux install. These days, you have multiple options for trying Unix from the comfort of a Windows PC or a Mac.
Since macOS is built on Unix, it’s as simple as opening the Terminal app, found in /Applications/Utilities. Or press Command-Space and type “terminal.”
At one time, Microsoft viewed Linux the same way the United States viewed the USSR. That’s changed, and the company now offers a baked-in way to install Linux alongside Windows in a single command called Windows Subsystem for Linux. It’s a little more complicated than on a Mac, but not by too much.
You can even access Linux on a Google Chromebook — since a Chromebook is just Linux with a Web browser slapped on top. Google offers a setting to access the Linux underpinnings.
Here’s your homework assignment: Investigate one of these options for your machine and make your way to a command prompt. But once you get there and the cursor blinks at you … then what?
Stay tuned. We’ll tell you what to do next. In the coming months, Return will be publishing simple guides to help all of us take back our digital sovereignty.
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