The concepts are there, and a lineage may be traced, but little of the original parts still exists.
This because the basic concepts that define unix allows it to be modular and adaptable.
"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."
[0] http://www.amazon.com/UNIX-Programming-Addison-Wesley-Profes...
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)
Thanks for sharing!
Something that seems to be lost on a solid portion of the current custodians of that legacy...
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...
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.