Annotated Unix Magic Poster

The #38 is controversial as noted. To me it represents the branching of Unix flavors, mostly derived from the AT&T and BSD versions (represented by the glasses.)

To me, the stuff that grows from a shell invocation must be a process tree.

Quite. I felt reminded of Git but it did not exist yet in the 1980s.

Interesting. When I look at this I see printed circuitry like you would find on a PCB. In which case it could represent the electrons flowing downwards into the processor which powers the shell. And the power source might be the wizard himself or his beard.

The power source is the fire underneath the shell.

Ahh. Good point! Perhaps a better analogy would be that the brain processing power is represented by the circuitry. I’d be curious to other interpretations for why it appears where it does.