A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.- Neal Stephenson, "In The Beginning. . . was the Command Line"What a fun read. It's about technology, sure, but more about culture. Neal takes a good look at operating systems, why we get emotionally involved with them, and why Windows is still so popular. He does this with a grand detour to Disneyland, and a hefty dose of humor. The above quote was from near the end of the book, where he imagines hackers creating big bangs from the command line.He starts out the book from some anecdotes from the early 1970s, when he had his first computer class in high school. His school didn't have a computer, but they did have a teletype (the physical kind that used paper) with a modem link to some university's system. But time on that system was so expensive that they couldn't just dial in and run things interactively. The teletype had a paper tape device. You'd type your commands in advance, and it would punch them out on the tape. Then when you dial in, it would replay the tape at "high speed".Neal liked this because the stuff punched out of the tape were, actually, "bits" in both the literal and the mathematical sense. This, of course, led to a scene at the end of the schoolyear where a classmate dumped the bin of bits on the teacher, and Neal witnessed megabytes falling to the floor.Although the book was written in 1999, and needs an update in some ways, it still speaks with a strong voice today -- and is now also an interesting look at what computing was like 10 years ago.He had an analogy of car dealerships to operating systems. Microsoft had the big shiny dealership selling station wagons. Their image was all wrapped up in people feeling good about their purchase -- like they got something for their money. And he said that the Linux folks were selling tanks, illustrated with this exchange:Hacker with bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music."Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!" Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!"Bullhorn: "But..."Buyer: "Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"That doesn't mean that Stephenson is just a Linux apologetic. He points out that the CLI has its place, and has a true love-hate relationship with the text-based config files (remember XF86Config before the days of automatic modelines? Back when you had to get out a calculator and work some things out with pencil and paper, or else risk burning out your monitor?) He points out that some people want to just have the thing work reasonably well. They don't want control -- in fact, would gladly give it up if offered something reasonably pretty and reasonably functional.He speaks to running Linux at times:Sometimes when you finish working with a program and shut it down, you find that it has left behind a series of mild warnings and low-grade error messages in the command-line interface window from which you launched it. As if the software were chatting to you about how it was doing the whole time you were working with it.Even if the application is imploding like a damaged submarine, it can still usually eke out a little S.O.S. message.Or about booting Linux the first time, and noticing all sorts of cryptic messages on the console:This is slightly alarming the first time you see it, but completely harmless.I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. . .Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer--i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed--emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish. For page layout and printing you can use TeX: a vast corpus of typesetting lore written in C and also available on the Net for free.I love these vivid descriptions: programs secretly chatting with us, TeX being a "corpus of typesetting lore" rather than a program. Or how about this one: "Unix. . . is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic." Yes, my operating system is an oral history project, thankyouverymuch.The book feels like a weird (but well-executed and well-written) cross between Douglas Adams and Cory Doctorow. Which makes is so indescribably awesome that I can't help but ending this review with a few more quotes.Because Linux is not commercial--because it is, in fact, free, as well as rather difficult to obtain, install, and operate--it does not have to maintain any pretensions as to its reliability. Consequently, it is much more reliable.what really sold me on it [Debian:] was its phenomenal bug database (http://www.debian.org/Bugs), which is a sort of interactive Doomsday Book of error, fallibility, and redemption.It is simplicity itself. When had a problem with Debian in early January of 1997, I sent in a message describing the problem to
[email protected]. 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.That should be our new slogan for bugs.debian.org: "Debian's interactive Doomsday Book of error, fallibility, and redemption."Unix is hard to learn. The process of learning it is one of multiple small epiphanies. Typically you are just on the verge of inventing some necessary tool or utility when you realize that someone else has already invented it, and built it in, and this explains some odd file or directory or command that you have noticed but never really understood before.I've been THERE countless times.Note the obsessive use of abbreviations and avoidance of capital letters; this is a system invented by people to whom repetitive stress disorder is what black lung is to miners. Long names get worn down to three-letter nubbins, like stones smoothed by a river.It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. 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 stone tablets bearing the Ten Commandments carved in immutable stone--the original command-line interfaceApparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.Unix has always lurked provocatively in the background of the operating system wars, like the Russian Army.Available for free online, or as a 160-page book from Amazon.
This essay is nearly 8 years old, and in dire need of an update. So in 2004 Grant Birkel set out to do just that, producing a set of comments called "The Command Line in 2004". It's freely available on the web, and I suggest you read that version instead of the (older) book.As far as Stephenson's original writing: Wow, what a disappointment. I think Neil Stephenson writes some fun and highly entertaining fiction, and I really enjoyed both Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. However, this was a subject that needed much more grounding and the essay doesn't have it - it's prone to offer ridiculous analogies, and often ditches the point entirely so it can lament McDonald's expansion into foreign countries and the popularity of the television show Cops outside American borders.Let me try to distill his argument: the GUI evolved on top of the command-line, and it allowed the computer to become much more accessible to the everyday user. However, the two major commercial OSes don't offer a way to get back to the command line in a useful way, and so "hackers" lose out on a lot of power and flexibility that they used to have over the machine. He extols the virtue of Linux because it gives you the terminal and doesn't offer the hand-holding and useless features that other OSes do. Stephenson likens the GUI to Disney Land, where ideas and cultures pass through a filter that narrows down the world to a single presentation accepted by the masses. In choosing the GUI we give up our control so we aren't overwhelmed by choice. (OS X pretty much demolishes this argument by itself, as Stephenson readily admits today, but things were different 8 years ago so it's better to look at this in a historical context)Now, this argument doesn't really hold up under close inspection. To provide a simple counter-argument: The command-line itself is an interface, just like the GUI, and the choice of what options to make available is not a factor of whether or not the mouse is an input device but whether or not the feature itself is a worthwhile addition. Linux lets any user contribute a feature that they would find handy, and the commercial world is instead driven by a need to provide more general features that the majority of users might pay for, but one could just as well argue that Linux is building a dull Swiss Army Knife while Windows and MacOS are building very sharp single tools. Like all interfaces there are good and bad design choices, independent of who developed the underlying OS, and that is the real problem. A well-designed interface will offer users a maximum amount of power and flexibility without impeding their ability to get tasks done - if an application is not up to par on this yet, it needs nothing more than simple refinement. This has nothing to do with the OS or GUI environment and everything to do with simple UI choices.I think the real trouble with this essay is one of viewpoint. Stephenson takes the position of someone who is computing just for computing's sake - he finds programming interesting in its own right, without a need to accomplish any specific task. So the most efficient way to do this at the time was the command-line interface, because you can be coding your function very quickly without having to delve into pages upon pages of window-opening code. (Incidentally this is only a problem of library refinement: we have had years to come up with printf() and getch() and all the little functions that make CLI programming easy - life was much tougher before the C stdlib. Nowadays GUI toolkits and languages based around the GUI make coding applications almost as easy as the CLI, and some are even cross-platform!)However, he's trying to foist this viewpoint onto all users, without allowing them the freedom to choose an OS to suit their own individual needs. It's almost as though he is insulting the users who want their PC to be nothing more than a tool to get their work done - those who like the simplicity of clicking emails in Outlook, who want to use the Start menu because it's fast and easy, or who think the Office paperclip is a handy feature. (Okay just kidding about that last one: nobody really believes that). At times he's suggesting that people are simply ignorant of other operating systems, and if they knew more, they'd pick a "better one". In any case, needing less direct interaction with the PC isn't any indication of a person's general interest in complexity... Perhaps a user of Windows will spend their time tying lures for fly-fishing, though most people would just buy some from the store. We all give up options in some areas of our lives to make time for flexibility in others. Birkel's counterpoint here is especially relevant because he continually points out that the real value of any UI is how much it enhances our ability to accomplish tasks, not how much we can muck things up with it.The last problem with this essay is that it's outdated. Of course there is nothing that can be done about that, though Birkel tried, but many readers would no longer find it so relevant.In summary: Don't bother with this one, unless you're highly interested in Neil Stephenson, operating systems in 1999, Linux zealotry, and anti-American Global culture. And even then, read the annotated version. I think Birkel's comments provide the grounding in reality that the original essay desperately needed.
Dated as any ten year old book about computing is going to be, I still highly recommend this exploration of the Operating System. A great deal of the history of Microsoft and Apple has now become myth, but Stephenson breaks it down nicely as what it really is--two corporations trying to make money. His metaphors--and the idea of the operating system as a metaphor--displayed the deft mastery of writing that one expects from him as an author. His broad knowledge of computing explained how he became such an excellent science fiction writer. And of course, his pithy little quips are worthy of any Linux programmer.This book is well worth a read for anyone, because I'm assuming if you're here on a web page, you've experienced an operating system at some point.
—Kathleen
This ridiculous collection of interrelated essays by Neal Stephenson manages to be both dated and contemporary, depending on whether you're still ranting about the advance of computer operating systems, or you've accepted the inevitable but are frustrated with its intractable failings.Stephenson wrote this book in 1998 and '99, and in it he rails against Windows and the Mac OS for taking away the power of the DOS prompt and making us all view computers visually. A professional writer, he believes that written commands are inherently superior to visual control of the computer - and fails to realize that unless you're using 1s and 0s to tell the computer what to do, you're pretty much communicating in metaphors anyways.Instead of these frustrating and flawed graphical user interfaces, the author argues, we should all get turned on to Linux, the free and powerful operating system designed by masses of volunteers. Great idea, except that - as Stephenson himself acknowledges - Linux is HARD to figure out, especially for the novice. The average novice wants to check e-mail, write in a word processor, surf the Web, and delegate the intense stuff to someone else.Even Stephenson admits that Linux is a bit of a bear to use if you're, say, a writer and not a coder. So after gradually building the case for this operating system, he changes allegiances to BeOS. Ironically, Be had already largely been abandoned by its developers by the time this book came out. It was completely dropped in 2001.When I call this book anachronistic or dated, it's because of Stephenson's advocacy for computer systems that were already waning as he wrote, and because of his naive - though still, in some circles, widely held - belief that Linux has any chance of taking hold in the real world. Yet many of his complaints about the failings of Windows and Macs are the same complaints that I have with the operating systems today. And they're underpinned by a clever assessment of the business models that drive Microsoft and Apple down similar yet different paths. You could take much of the content of the first third of this book today, and transpose it into the competing "I'm a Mac"/"I'm a PC" commercials. Ten years later, the same arguments fly back and forth and still neither dominant competitor really has a computer system that meets all of our needs.
—Courtney
The tech is dated. The observations about language, culture, and free will are not. "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 values 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 any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence."Critical reading of original essay with tech updates by Garrett Birkel here: http://garote.bdmonkeys.net/commandli... .
—tartaruga fechada
