151 pages
English language
Published Feb. 27, 1999
In the Beginning... Was the Command Line is an essay by Neal Stephenson which was originally published online in 1999 and later made available in book form (November 1999, ISBN 978-0380815937). The essay is a commentary on why the proprietary operating systems business is unlikely to remain profitable in the future because of competition from free software. It also analyzes the corporate/collective culture of the Microsoft, Apple, and free software communities.
The essay, meant to be a look at the state of the art, has become an interesting snapshot of computing at the turn of the millennium. I was expecting a more balanced and timeless argument for command lines over more abstract user interfaces and was disappointed to find a simplistic and (at least by now,) tired "more control vs less hassle" argument.
Interesting essay, but nothing I didn't already know.
I'm not a huge fan of Stephenson's fiction, but I enjoy his explanations of complex technical ideas that he sprinkles liberally through his novels. He is able to disassemble the most intimidating subjects -- cryptography, nanotechnology, amongst others -- and reassemble them bit by bit before your eyes. By the time he has finished, you find yourself wondering what you found so difficult about the topic in the first place.
In "In the Beginning... was the Command Line," Stephenson performs just such a feat. He gives a potted history of operating systems, while arguing that GUI-based OSes tend to fail when we least expect it primarily because of the complexities they cover up.
I originally read "In the Beginning..." in 2000, around the time I was making my first tentative steps into the world of Linux. I loved it then. I was thrilled. Everything that he said about Linux excited …
I'm not a huge fan of Stephenson's fiction, but I enjoy his explanations of complex technical ideas that he sprinkles liberally through his novels. He is able to disassemble the most intimidating subjects -- cryptography, nanotechnology, amongst others -- and reassemble them bit by bit before your eyes. By the time he has finished, you find yourself wondering what you found so difficult about the topic in the first place.
In "In the Beginning... was the Command Line," Stephenson performs just such a feat. He gives a potted history of operating systems, while arguing that GUI-based OSes tend to fail when we least expect it primarily because of the complexities they cover up.
I originally read "In the Beginning..." in 2000, around the time I was making my first tentative steps into the world of Linux. I loved it then. I was thrilled. Everything that he said about Linux excited me, and confirmed what I was discovering on a day to day basis. Reading it now, I'm surprised I didn't run off and install BeOS.
But more than anything what I took away from "In the Beginning..." -- both then and now -- is Stephenson's remarkable and astute observation that Linux would never have come into being without Microsoft Windows. While on first glance this may seem both ridiculous and deliberately contrary, Stephenson makes a persuasive argument. It is an argument that I have used over and over again when discussing the relative merits of various operating systems. I'll let you read the essay to discover what the argument is, sine half the fun is getting there.
The essay has, by and large, aged relatively well, despite the changes in the world of Operating Systems. Since the release of OS X, Macintosh has changed considerably. BeOS -- which he uses as a sort of foil to Linux, Windows and Mac -- is now defunct, though it lives on in a number of projects. A follow-up essay seems in order. Perhaps in a year, when the essay is a decade old.
