At the time I got into Unix in 1976, E. F. Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful" book was fairly popular, with IBM and the BUNCH as the bloated counterpoint (OS/MVS kernels were 256K!), and the idea of Unix as the small is beautiful operating system was a common theme.
It wasn't really about small. Small was the happy result of a way of approaching problems. It was about putting in the time to think things through, rather than just emitting gobs of code. Hence a common theme was the idea you did your best to avoid writing code by spending time working things through. RK05s, 16 bit address space, and Decwriter II terminals tended to encourage that kind of economy. Those days are long gone of course; I noticed the other day that on Linux there are 16 commands that start with ls, that do roughly the same function, and nobody seems to think this is a bad thing. The only place the original 'small is beautiful' Unix ideas continue on that I know of is Plan 9.
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