Posix - a portable operating system .

Legacy software and hardware were tied at the hip. The idea of a portable operating system was beyond imagination. Despite industry-wide attempts to centralize, Unix systems run on wide variety of hardware architectures - from mainframes to smartphones. In a way, Unix fragmented itself to jailbreak the hardware. Birth of a self-contained digital layer. A user was assured of same set of utilities no matter what underlying physical circuitry.