Neal Stephenson

This is "the Word" -- one man's word, certainly -- about the art (and artifice) of the state of our computer-centric existence. And considering that the "one man" is Neal Stephenson, "the hacker Hemingway" (Newsweek) -- acclaimed novelist, pragmatist, seer, nerd-friendly philosopher, and nationally bestselling author of groundbreaking literary works (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, etc., etc.) -- the word is well worth hearing. Mostly well-reasoned examination and partial rant, Stephenson's In the Beginning... was the Command Line is a thoughtful, irreverent, hilarious treatise on the cyber-culture past and present; on operating system tyrannies and downloaded popular revolutions; on the Internet, Disney World, Big Bangs, not to mention the meaning of life itself.

In the Beginning...was the Command Line

Sarah Sammis

In the Beginning... was a RABCK to me from another BookCrosser. I had put it on my wishlist after enjoying Snowcrash and wanted to see what he'd have to say in a nonfiction book about computers. Stephenson's turn of phrase reminds me a bit of Scott Adams in both the good and the bad.

Overall I enjoyed the book but I was glad it was a short one. The chapters from his comparison of Disney World to the modern day operating system onward drag. These final essays are more rants than insights into the nature of computers and programming. I got rather tired about his wining about failed computers and his inability to install Windows NT after giving up on MacOS. What he fails to realize is that hardware failures are part and parcel of working with mobile machines (laptops). They will never be as stable as their desktop counterparts. Instead, though, he blames the OS.

The book also suffers from being out of date. BeOS is dead and MacOS is now a flavor of Unix. It also has a command line. New Macs also now run on Intel chips so his complaints against the Motorola chips are also moot. But in all fairness, the book was published in 1999 when Apple's future wasn't too bright.

In the Beginning...Was the Command Line

Gavin

The basic tenet of multiculturalism 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… The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there’s no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macramé. The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire point of having a culture. I think this is why guys with machine guns sometimes pop up in places like Luxor and begin pumping bullets into Westerners.


Classic, cynical cultural history of popular computing. A noob-friendly guide to breaking free: a love letter to GNU: “Linux… are making tanks… Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free… It is the fate of manufactured goods to slowly and gently depreciate as they get old and have to compete against more modern products. But it is the fate of operating systems to become free.” 

If you’re like me (human?), you need metaphors and binary distinctions to get abstract stuff, and Stephenson has them coming out of his ears, which sometimes leads to a stone-tablet patronising tone*.

  Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces.”)
 

An amazing writer, though: he finds program comments "like the terse mutterings of pilots wrestling with the controls of damaged airplanes." In tech, 15 years is a full geological era and a half*, so some of his insights have taken on a sepia hue (e.g. “is [Microsoft] addicted to OS sales in the same way as Apple is to selling hardware? Keep in mind that Apple's ability to monopolize its own hardware supply was once cited, by learned observers, as a great advantage over Microsoft. At the time, it seemed to place them in a much stronger position. In the end, it nearly killed them, and may kill them yet... When things started to go south for Apple, they should have ported their OS to cheap PC hardware. But they didn't. Instead, they tried to make the most of their brilliant hardware, adding new features and expanding the product line. But this only had the effect of making their OS more dependent on these special hardware features, which made it worse for them in the end. ”). But astonishingly, most have not – and how many other tech articles from the 90s are still worth a single minute of your time? 


Free! here


* He uses this very metaphor in this short essay.

In the Beginning...was the Command Line

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