In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999)

The analogy is definitely a bit outdated now, what with Windows 8 then 10 then 11 getting aggressively less user-friendly each year.

Anyway, an awesome and prescient book.

Anathem, Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle… Neal Stephenson is an absolute master of his craft, though he is famous for failing to stick the landings sometimes.

Still true 25 years later!

"Now THAT is a cool operating system, and if such a thing were actually made available on the Internet (for free, of course) every hacker in the world would download it right away and then stay up all night long messing with it, spitting out universes right and left."

At the same time, there will be uncool operating systems designed for data collection, surveillance and ad services

> Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"

Literally every conversation I have had with people where I have tried to get them to use Linux :').

Is this… right?

I thought some of the earliest mechanical computers (as opposed to human computers) that had much real uptake were “fire control computers,” for things like naval guns (for example). You move around dials and cranks to put the measurements in. I’d call this essentially graphical… it isn’t a series of text based commands that you issue, but a collection of intuitive UI elements, each of which is used to communicate a particular piece of data to the computer. Of course the GUI of the past was made of gages and levers instead of pixels, but that’s just an implementation detail.

I much prefer the command line to a gui, but I think we should call it what it is: an improvement. A much more precise and repeatable way of talking to the computer, in comparison to cranking cranks and poking dials. And a general, endlessly flexible channel that can represent basically any type of information, at the cost of not necessary being intuitive or glance-able.

The metaphors for Windows and MacOS are swapped. Windows' technical underpinnings were - from the start - way better than Apple's. Microsoft actually bothered to copy everything from XEROX PARC, albeit poorly, while Apple saw the fancy windows-and-desktop UI and ignored the object system underpinning it. This isn't me making a jab at Apple - Jobs himself said it when he was at NeXT. Windows 95 and NT also both brought memory protection to the existing Windows API. Apple had spent several years trying and failing to build a memory protected Mac OS before just giving up and buying NeXT.

The correct metaphors are:

- Someone working at the phone company secretly designs a tram (UNIX). They're actually prohibited from selling vehicles, but they license the design under the table to a bunch of universities. A bunch of tram manufacturers make trams based off the phone company design.

- A wheel factory (Microsoft) sells wheels for bicycles. Bicycle dealerships crop up everywhere using their wheels. Even the railroads (IBM) want to get in on it, and they ship a terrible bike that everyone copies because it's the railway bike.

- Phone company designed trams are really popular and every city has like five of them. Except they keep breaking down and all the control cabs are just slightly different, so it pisses off the operators. Some kids at Berkeley try to make their own standard tram design (BSD) but they get sued by the phone company and nobody uses it.

- A car dealership (XEROX) moves in. They sell SUVs (Xerox STAR). They cost $100k each, and they only sell them in huge fleets to big corporations because XEROX wants to compete with the railroad. Nobody buys them and they leave town, but not before giving a demo of their tech to the last bicycle dealer (Apple) not using the railway design.

- The bicycle dealership decides to build their own SUV (Lisa) and a moped (Mac). The SUV is a huge flop while the moped is a minor success. Their CEO gets fired by the board and starts a trucking company (NeXT).

- A homeless man that lives on public transit and thinks vehicles should be free starts working on his own tram (GNU), but he overengineers the engine (Hurd) and it doesn't work at all. Still, he's not being sued by the phone company, so people start putting his parts into their trams anyway.

- The wheel factory learned how to make a moped from selling wheels to the moped dealer. So they sell their own moped upgrade kit (Windows). It works with any bicycle, but it looks like shit, even though it has the same power as an SUV engine.

- The wheel factory also starts work on a joint venture with the local railroad to produce their own trucks (OS/2). They can't agree on anything and divorce after a few years.

- Turns out mopeds suck! They break down constantly and need an oil change every 400 miles. The moped dealer starts work on a station wagon (Copland). A prototype is produced that's about as elegant as The Homer. It is unceremoniously cancelled.

- The wheel factory also has problems with their moped kits breaking down, but since they sold a lot more of them, they're the ones getting the reputation of selling an unreliable vehicle. They decide to design a truck of their own (Windows NT) and a car made out of moped parts (Windows 95) and sell the design to all the bicycle (now car) dealers.

- The moped company is ridiculed by the car dealers and nobody buys their elegantly designed mopeds. They wind up buying the trucking company.

- Someone in Finland designs an electric motor (Linux) that happens to fit in the homeless guy's tram. People hail this as a revolution in public transport, even though cities are full of NIMBYs who tore down the tramways and put in buses that ride worse and get delayed in traffic.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24998305

Please. They resold an already existing OS created by another individual. The idea that there was some "vision" here in being an IBM contractor is a total misunderstanding of the history of the time.