I don't think that long uptimes is unix culture at all. unix was always about being small, simple and fun to use, A place where having something now is much more valuable than being correct later. A hackers OS. This is also where most of the sins of unix come from.
"We went to lunch afterward, and I remarked to Dennis that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, "We left all that stuff out. If there's an error, we have this routine called panic(), and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, 'Hey, reboot it.'"
