In the Beginning…Was the Command Line
Metadata
- Author: Neal Stephenson
Highlights
this was telling me two things about people’s relationship to technology. One was that romance and image go a long way toward shaping their opinions. If you doubt it (and if you have a lot of spare time on your hands), just ask anyone who owns a Macintosh and who, on those grounds, imagines him- or herself to be a member of an oppressed minority group.
interface is very important. Sure, the MGB was a lousy car in almost every way that counted: balky, unreliable, underpowered. But it was fun to drive. It was responsive. Every pebble on the road was felt in the bones, every nuance in the pavement transmitted instantly to the driver’s hands. He could listen to the engine and tell what was wrong with it. The steering responded immediately to commands from his hands. To us passengers it was a pointless exercise in going nowhere—about as interesting as peering over someone’s shoulder while he punches numbers into a spreadsheet. But to the driver it was an experience. For a short time he was extending his body and his senses into a larger realm, and doing things that he couldn’t do unassisted.
This is part of yhe appeal of the self bosted shstem.
With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It’s a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other.
Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.
If they even notice the people on the opposite side of the road, selling the cheaper, technically superior vehicles, these customers deride them as cranks and half-wits.
Th “sophisticated” apple crowd. Although at tbis point inwonder if this still.holds and whether Aple is gainjng a market shsre.
computers do arithmetic on bits of information. Humans construe the bits as meaningful symbols.
art—people start to get emotional and grow attached to pieces of software in the same sort of way my friend’s dad did to his MGB.
Notably us Linux fans!
The important thing is that no matter what splendid multimedia web pages they might represent, HTML files are just telegrams.
Telgrams and fax machines are simllythe old versionnof what e do now, with TCP connections and slurce material.acwuisition
So an OS is a stack of metaphors and abstractions that stands between you and the telegrams, and embodying various tricks the programmer used to convert the information you’re working with—be
When we use most modern operating systems, though, our interaction with the machine is heavily mediated. Everything we do is interpreted and translated time and again as it works its way down through all of the metaphors and abstractions.
This is exactly the attraction of CLI first OS for me. The ability to.peer into low levels, to see and interpret for.myself what is goijg on instead of relying on someone else tl translate the picture.
i.am reminded of learning how tl use MSDOS in elementsry school. We didnt understand the labgusge itself and to us it was magic being abke to press a few buttons that would lead to a computer game.
Were GUIs a brilliant design innovation that made computers more human-centered and therefore accessible to the masses, leading us toward an unprecedented revolution in human society, or an insulting bit of audiovisual gimcrackery dreamed up by flaky Bay Area hacker types that stripped computers of their power and flexibility and turned the noble and serious work of computing into a childish video game?
Hostility toward Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, and disdainful people who think it’s tacky.
Microsoft is the very embodiment of modern high-tech prosperity—it is, in a word, bourgeois—and so it attracts all of the same gripes.
All of this is perfectly congruent with membership in the bourgeoisie, which is as much a mental as a material state. And it explains why Microsoft is regularly attacked, on the Net and elsewhere, from both sides. People who are inclined to feel poor and oppressed construe everything Microsoft does as some sinister Orwellian plot. People who like to think of themselves as intelligent and informed technology users are driven crazy by the clunkiness of Windows.
Only last week (I am writing this sentence in early January 1999) the technology sections of all the newspapers were filled with adulatory press coverage of how Apple had released the iMac in several happenin’ new colors like Blueberry and Tangerine.
But the objections still exist. The most hackerish of all the hackers, the Ur-hacker, as it were, was and is Richard Stallman, who became so annoyed with the evil practice of selling software that in 1984 (the same year that the Macintosh went on sale) he went off and founded something called the Free Software Foundation, which commenced work on something called GNU.
Because at its heart, an operating system is nothing more than a library containing the most commonly used code, written once (and hopefully written well), and then made available to every coder who needs it.
So a proprietary, closed, secret operating system is a contradiction in terms. It goes against the whole point of having an operating system. And it is impossible to keep them secret anyway. The source code—the original lines of text written by the programmers—can be kept secret.
What’s hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not the writing; it’s deciding what to write.
MS-DOS was duplicated, functionally, by a rival product, written from scratch, called ProDOS, that did all of the same things in pretty much the same way. In other words, another company was able to write code that did all of the same things as MS-DOS and sell it at a profit. If you are using the Linux OS, you can get a free program called WINE,
Remember that this was writteb circa 1999!
it is the fate of operating systems to become free.
Now it really ought to be jettisoned, like a spent booster stage from a rocket. The big question is whether Microsoft is capable of doing this. Or is it addicted to OS sales in the same way as Apple is to selling hardware?
22 years later the ansaer sees to be no. Turns kut cresting aoftware that only works within a prkperietary OS means controlling the OS is critical. And peolle just want things to work - the hackers and prlgrammers are bgy fsr the minkrity. However, Steam is currebtky in the midts of habing this: if all.OS ar ukmtimatelly the same, Stea pushes for the OS that will rule them.al: Linhx.
every time someone decides to use a non-Microsoft OS, Microsoft’s OS division, obviously, loses a customer. But, as things stand now, Microsoft’s applications division loses a customer too. This is not such a big deal as long as almost everyone uses Microsoft OSes. But as soon as Windows’ market share begins to slip, the math starts to look pretty dismal for the people in Redmond.
Such is the dangeor kr Steam etc. Howver this warbing is from 20 years go and we now have subscription services and all knckusove pckGes that rewuire the OS
There are only two reasons to invest in Apple and Microsoft. (1) Each of these companies is in what we would call a codependency relationship with their customers. The customers Want To Believe, and Apple and Microsoft know how to give them what they want. (2) Each company works very hard to add new features to their OSes, which works to secure customer loyalty, at least for a little while.
One might also invest in them for great fina cial.gaon. Lerhaps ober 200 years you are right but ina tenth of that time id have tl strongly disagree
Microsoft must get used to the experience—unthinkable in other industries—of throwing millions of dollars into the development of new technologies, such as web browsers, and then seeing the same or equivalent software show up on the Internet for free two years, or a year, or even just a few months, later.
Reference tome tonopen source blog post.
So Apple and Microsoft shower new features upon their users almost daily, in the hopes that a steady stream of genuine technical innovations, combined with the “I want to believe” phenomenon, will prevent their customers from looking across the road toward the cheaper and better OSes that are available to them.
But the game has turned ibto kne lf wled gardens and ecosystems - the features touted by one or theboher are kntehrated, withiut efort from the user. And so Linux and the like remain obscure.
then they will bet the whole farm on their OSes and tie all of their new applications and technologies to them.
This is preciselg the caze. Even with the advebt of software alternstives and GNU having an optipn, it is always the integratjon of these systems.
not only are we not offended to be dazzled by manufactured images, but we like it. We practically insist on it. We are eager to be complicit in our own dazzlement: to pay money for a theme park ride, vote for a guy who’s obviously lying to us, or stand there holding the basket as it’s filled up with cosmetics.
In general they only seem comfortable with media that have been ratified by great age, massive popular acceptance, or both. In this world, artists are like the anonymous, illiterate stone carvers who built the great cathedrals of Europe and then faded away into unmarked graves in the churchyard.
But it’s easy to find the whole environment a little creepy, because something is missing: the translation of all its content into clear explicit written words, the attribution of the ideas to specific people. You can’t argue with it. It seems as if a hell of a lot might be being glossed over, as if Disney World might be putting one over on us, and possibly getting away with all kinds of buried assumptions and muddled thinking.
We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books anymore, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations non-verbally, through a process of being steeped in media.
I am bot entirly sure that i agree. Is Americman exceptionalism really “freedom”? Is a cultural free for al something to spire to?
Humans are conversant in many media (music, dance, painting), but all of them are analog except for the written word, which is naturally expressed in digital form (i.e. it is a series of discrete symbols—every letter in every book is a member of a certain character set, every “a” is the same as every other “a,” and so on).
The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or “honoring diversity” or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other—to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities. The lesson most people are taking home from the twentieth century is that, in order for a large number of different cultures to coexist peacefully on the globe (or even in a neighborhood) it is necessary for people to suspend judgment in this way.
As David Foster Wallace has explained in his essay “E Unibus Pluram,” this is the fundamental message of television; it is the message that people absorb, anyway, after they have steeped in our media long enough. It’s not expressed in these highfalutin terms, of course. It comes through as the presumption that all authority figures—teachers, generals, cops, ministers, politicians—are hypocritical buffoons, and that hip jaded coolness is the only way to be.
Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being. And—again—perhaps the goal of all this is to make us feckless so we won’t nuke each other.
So GUIs use metaphors to make computing easier, but they are bad metaphors. Learning to use them is essentially a word game, a process of learning new definitions of words such as “window” and “document” and “save” that are different from, and in many cases almost diametrically opposed to, the old.
The average buyer of an OS is not really paying for, and is not especially interested in, the low-level code that allocates memory or writes bytes onto the disk. What we’re really buying is a system of metaphors. And—much more important—what we’re buying into is the underlying assumption that metaphors are a good way to deal with the world.
That odd collection of gizmos, which survives to this day in every car on the road, made up what we would today call a user interface. But if cars had been invented after Macintoshes, carmakers would not have bothered to gin up all of these arcane devices. We would have a computer screen instead of a dashboard, and a mouse (or at best a joystick) instead of a steering wheel, and we’d shift gears by pulling down a menu:
Indeed thisbis exactly where webare going, except the wheel continues to b the perhaps the best interfsce for cobtrolling a car.
Driving a car through a GUI would be a miserable experience. Even if the GUI were perfectly bug-free, it would be incredibly dangerous, because menus and buttons simply can’t be as responsive as direct mechanical controls. My friend’s dad, the gentleman who was restoring the MGB, never would have bothered with it if it had been equipped with a GUI. It wouldn’t have been any fun.
The somutuon nis that cars witg GUIs have to make use of additional techbology abd selective blocking to increase the safety of the passengers (as well as the profits of the company).
Computer people call this “the blinking twelve problem.” When they talk about it, though, they usually aren’t talking about VCRs.
Having the ability to control something is bkt the same as being abke to donit. Thus the existence of consumer distros like EOS instead of straight arch
Sometime in the mid-1990s I attempted to open one of my old, circa-1985 Word documents using the version of Word then current: 6.0. It didn’t work. Word 6.0 did not recognize a document created by an earlier version of itself.
On the other hand, I could have chosen the “Save as Text” option in Word and saved all of my documents as simple “telegrams,” and this problem would not have arisen. Instead I had allowed myself to be seduced by all of those flashy formatting options that hadn’t even existed until GUIs had come along to make them practicable. I had gotten into the habit of using them to make my documents look pretty (perhaps prettier than they deserved to look; all of the old documents on those floppies turned out to be more or less crap).
This fellow was the second person who turned me on to Macintoshes, by the way, and through the mid-1980s we had shared the thrill of being hightech cognoscenti, using superior Apple technology in a world of DOS-using knuckleheads.
Skunds not unlike the Linux uservase of today
Apple, in spite of its reputation as the machine of choice of scruffy, creative hacker types, had actually created a machine that discouraged hacking, while Microsoft, viewed as a technological laggard and copycat, had created a vast, disorderly parts bazaar—a primordial soup that eventually self-assembled into Linux.
But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. The Hole Hawg is dangerous because it does exactly what you tell it to. It is not bound by the physical limitations that are inherent in a cheap drill, and neither is it limited by safety interlocks that might be built into a homeowner’s product by a liability-conscious manufacturer.
A smaller tool is dangerous too, but for a completely different reason: it tries to do what you tell it to, and fails in some way that is unpredictable and almost always undesirable. But the Hole Hawg is like the genie of the ancient fairy tales, who carries out his master’s instructions literally and precisely and with unlimited power, often with disastrous, unforeseen consequences.
Now I view them all with such contempt that I do not even consider them to be real drills—merely scaled-up toys designed to exploit the self-delusional tendencies of soft-handed homeowners who want to believe that they have purchased an actual tool.
someone who had been raised by contractors and who had never used any drill other than a Hole Hawg. Such a person, presented with the best and most expensive hardware-store drill, would not even recognize it as such. He might instead misidentify it as a child’s toy, or some kind of motorized screwdriver. If a salesperson or a deluded homeowner referred to it as a drill, he would laugh and tell them that they were mistaken—they simply had their terminology wrong. His interlocutor would go away irritated, probably feeling rather defensive about his basement full of cheap, dangerous, flashy, colorful tools.
But once you are logged in as one person, you can temporarily switch over to a pseudonym in order to access different files. If your machine is on the Internet, you can log on to other computers, provided you have a user name and a password. At that point the distant machine becomes no different in practice from the one right in front of you. These changes in identity and location can easily become nested inside each other, many layers deep, even if you aren’t doing anything nefarious. Once you have forgotten who and where you are, the whoami command is indispensible. I use it all the time.
Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product’ as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.
Source files are useless to your computer, and of little interest to most users, but they are of gigantic cultural and political significance, because Microsoft and Apple keep them secret while Linux makes them public.
I sent in a message describing the problem to submit@bugs.debian.org. My problem was promptly assigned a bug report number (#6518) and a severity level (the available choices being critical, grave, important, normal, fixed, and wishlist) and forwarded to mailing lists where Debian people hang out. Within twenty-four hours I had received five e-mails telling me how to fix the problem: two from North America, two from Europe, and one from Australia. All of these e-mails gave me the same suggestion, which worked, and made my problem go away. But at the same time, a transcript of this exchange was posted to Debian’s bug database, so that if other users had the same problem later, they would be able to search through and find the solution without having to enter a redundant bug report.
EEE in place vwhen we look at how Github has been acquired by Microsoft!
own classification system, including such categories as “Not a Bug,” “Acknowledged Feature,” and “Will Not Fix.” Some of the “bugs” here are nothing more than Be hackers blowing off steam, and are classified as “Input Acknowledged.”
Is this the source for GitHubs bug trackibg schema?
As I’ve explained, selling OSes for money is a basically untenable position, and the only way Apple and Microsoft can get away with it is by pursuing technological advancements as aggressively as they can, and by getting people to believe in, and to pay for, a particular image: in the case of Apple, that of the creative free thinker, and in the case of Microsoft, that of the respectable techno-bourgeois.
doing business with a company called Cygnus Support, which exists to provide assistance to users of free software. But I didn’t, because I wanted to see if I could do it myself. The answer turned out to be yes, but just barely. There are many tweaks and optimizations that I could probably make in my system that I have never gotten around to attempting, partly because I get tired of being a Morlock some days, and partly because I am afraid of fouling up a system that generally works well.
Microsoft has power because people believe it does. This power is very real. It makes lots of money.
Exactly why jts hard to pinpoint the EEE kf Microsoft when they are sinoly “embracing” kpen slurce.