I'm on board with this.<p>Unix is my favorite OS.<p>I like that it's fundamental unit of work is the process, and that, as users, we have ready access to those. Processes are cheap and easy.<p>I can stack them together with a | character. I can shove them in the background with a & (or ^Z and bg, or whatever). Cron is simple. at(1) and batch(1) are simple.<p>The early machines I worked on, processes were a preallocated thing on boot. They weren't some disposable piece of work. You could do a lot with it, but it's not the same.<p>Even when I was working on VMS, I "never" started new processes. Not like you do in Unix. Not ad hoc, "just for a second". No, I just worked directly with what I had. I could not compose new workflows readily out of processes.<p>Processes give a lot of isolation and safety. If a process goes mad, it's (usually) easily killed with little impact to the overall system. Thus its cheap and forgiving to mess up with processes.<p>inetd was a great idea. Tie stdin/stdout to a socket. Any one and their brother Frank could write a service managed by inetd -- in anything. CGI-BIN is the same way. The http server does the routing, the process manages the rest. Can you imagine shared hosting without processes? I shudder at the thought.<p>Binary processes are cheap too, with shared code segments making easy forks, fast startup, low system impact. The interpreters, of course, wrecked that whole thing. And, arguably, the systems were "fast enough" to make that impact low.<p>But inetd, running binary processes? That is not a slow server. It can be faster (pre-forking, threads, dedicated daemons), but that combo is not necessarily slow. I think the sqlite folks basically do this with Fossil on their server.<p>Note, I'm not harping on "one process, one thing", that's different. Turns out when processes are cheap and nimble, then that concept kind of glitters at the bottom of the pan. But that's policy, not capability.<p>But the Unix system is just crazy malleable and powerful. People talk about a post-holocaust system. How they want something like CP/M cuz its simple. But, really? What a horrific system! Yes, a "unix like system" is an order of magnitude more complex than something like CP/M. But its far more than an order of magnitude more capable. It's worth the expense.<p>Even something weak, like Coherent on a 286. Yea, it had its limitations, but the fundamentals were there. At the end of the world, just give me a small kernel, sh, vi, cc, and ld -- I can write the rest of the userland -- poorly :).