Microservices is UNIX philosophy of multiprocessing and IPC taken to the network level.

Sun Microsystems business quote on their manuals, "The network is the computer".

Then again, besides being a famous book quote, most commercial UNIXes never cared about such philosophy.

Engineering is all about trade-offs, and taking good trade-offs to the next level usually makes them bad. This is a prime example.

I'm not convinced they are different. Take a large program and break it down into smaller programs with a singular purpose.

Unix is text processing.

Contenerized microservices is also text processing, but you add 2 new layers of abstraction for every operation you do.

Containerized microservices for a todo list app is an example. No one seriously claims that an example like that needs to be implemented that way.

People were using the “Unix philosophy” in the 2000s to try to satisfy the demands of the consumer internet. It failed miserably at that, and was replaced.