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You may well ask what light cyberpunk maestro Neal Stephenson can shed on the subject of operating systems and interface design. He's better known for his novels:
Snow Crash, a dystopian not-too-distant future of avatars, linguistic software viruses and rent-a-nukes;
The Diamond Age in which Victorian values come a cropper of nanotechnology; and
Cryptonomicon, his 900 page opus spanning the development of hacking from before Bletchley Park to a contemporary data haven in Southeast Asia, complete with an (imaginary, obviously) gay love scene in the woods outside New Haven involving cryptography pioneer
Alan Turing.
No one could read a Stephenson novel and not recognise his frighteningly powerful grasp of social and political history, and of technology that underpins all his stories. Read the liner notes on Snow Crash and you'll realise this is a man who probably considers Apple's Human Interface Guidelines to be soothing bedtime reading.
In the Beginning...Was the Command Line gives Stephenson an opportunity to flex his own non-fictional muscles. Part memoir, part developer's history of operating systems, it trawls through CLIs (command line interfaces) such as MS-DOS to GUIs (graphical user interfaces), the then-as now--revolutionary Macintosh OS, and everything since: Windows 98 (note: purist Stephenson doesn't even consider this an OS), Unix and Linux.
By the end of his enlightening, exhaustive elucidation of these and other TLAs, you too may suffer the subject of one of the book's final chapters: "geek fatigue". Not to worry--if there's one thing of which you can be certain it's that Stephenson never takes himself, or his subject, too seriously, and anything that cites Dilbert cartoons and H. G. Wells as source material has got to be a giant step forward. --Liz Bailey
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Neal Stephenson, author of the sprawling and engaging
Cryptonomicon, has written a manifesto that could be spoken by a character from that brilliant book. Primarily,
In the Beginning ... Was the Command Line discusses the past and future of personal computer operating systems. "It is the fate of manufactured goods to slowly and gently depreciate as they get old," he writes, "but it is the fate of operating systems to become free." While others in the computer industry express similarly dogmatic statements, Stephenson charms the reader into his way of thinking, providing anecdotes and examples that turn the pages for you.
Stephenson is a techie, and he's writing for an audience of coders and hackers in Command Line. The idea for this essay began online, when a shortened version of it was posted on Slashdot.org. The book still holds some marks of an e-mail flame gone awry, and some tangents should have been edited to hone his formidable arguments. But unlike similar writers who also discuss technical topics, he doesn't write to exclude; readers who appreciate computing history (like Dealers of Lightning or Fire in the Valley) can easily step into this book.
Stephenson tackles many myths about industry giants in this volume, specifically Apple and Microsoft. By now, every newspaper reader has heard of Microsoft's overbearing business practices, but Stephenson cuts to the heart of new issues for the software giant with a finely sharpened steel blade. Apple fares only a little better as Stephenson (a former Mac user himself) highlights the early steps the company took to prepare for a monopoly within the computer market--and its surprise when this didn't materialize. Linux culture gets a thorough--but fair--skewering, and the strengths of BeOS are touted (although no operating system is nearly close enough to perfection in Stephenson's eyes).
As for the rest of us, who have gladly traded free will and an intellectual understanding of computers for a clutter-free, graphically pleasing interface, Stephenson has thoughts to offer as well. He fully understands the limits nonprogrammers feel in the face of technology (an example being the "blinking 12" problem when your VCR resets itself). Even so, within Command Line he convincingly encourages us as a society to examine the metaphors of technology--simplifications that aren't really much simpler--that we greedily accept. --Jennifer Buckendorff
von Steven Levy
von Neal Stephenson
von Neal Stephenson
von Neal Stephenson
von Neal Stephenson
