The UNIX way

What's so cool about the UNIX philosophy? What would a heavy UNIX philosophy operating system look like? What is the most heavy UNIX philosophy operating system out there at the moment, besides UNIX itself?

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/cacm.html

In the absence of the ability to redirect output and input, a still clumsier method would have been to require the ls command to accept user requests to paginate its output, to print in multi-column format, and to arrange that its output be delivered off-line. Actually it would be surprising, and in fact unwise for efficiency reasons, to expect authors of commands such as ls to provide such a wide variety of output options.

lol gnu