Even if that fantasy came true, though, most users (including myself, on certain days) wouldn’t want to bother learning to use all of those arcane commands and struggling with all of the failures; a few dud universes can really clutter up your basement. After we’d spent a while pounding out command lines and hitting that enter key and spawning dull, failed universes, we would start to long for an OS that would go all the way to the opposite extreme: an OS that had the power to do everything—to live our life for us. In this OS, all of the possible decisions we could ever want to make would have been anticipated by clever programmers and condensed into a series of dialog boxes. By clicking on radio buttons we could choose from among mutually exclusive choices (HETEROSEXUAL/HOMOSEXUAL). Columns of check boxes would enable us to select the things that we wanted in our life (GET MARRIED/WRITE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL) and for more complicated options we could fill in little text boxes (NUMBER OF DAUGHTERS/NUMBER OF SONS:).
Even this user interface would begin to look awfully complicated after a while, with so many choices and so many hidden interactions between choices. It could become damn near unmanageable—the blinking twelve problem all over again. The people who brought us this operating system would have to provide templates and wizards, giving us a few default lives that we could use as starting places for designing our own. Chances are that these default lives would actually look pretty good to most people, good enough, anyway, that they’d be reluctant to tear them open and mess around with them for fear of making them worse. So after a few releases, the software would begin to look even simpler: you would boot it up and it would present you with a dialog box with a single large button in the middle labeled: LIVE. Once you had clicked that button, your life would begin. If anything got out of whack, or failed to meet your expectations, you could complain about it to Microsoft’s Customer Support Department. If you got a flack on the line, he or she would tell you that your life was actually fine, that there was not a thing wrong with it, and in any event it would be a lot better after the next upgrade was rolled out. But if you persisted, and identified yourself as advanced, you might get through to an actual engineer.
What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem and enumerated all of the dissatisfactions in your life? He would probably tell you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don’t like having choices made for you, you should start making your own.
About the Author
NEAL TOWN STEPHENSON is the author of Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Zodiac, and Cryptonomicon. Born on Halloween, 1959, in Fort Meade, Maryland—home of the National Security Agency—he grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and Ames, Iowa, before attending college in Boston. Since 1984 he has lived mostly in the Pacific Northwest and has made a living out of writing novels and the occasional magazine article.
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IN THE BEGINNING…WAS THE COMMAND LINE. Copyright © 1999 by Neal Stephenson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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* According to a rigorous, and arguably somewhat old-fashioned, definition of “operating system,” Windows 95 and 98 are not operating systems at all, but rather a set of applications that run on MS-DOS, which is an operating system. In practice, Windows 95 and 98 are marketed and thought of as OSes and so I will tend to refer to them as such. This nomenclature is technically questionable, politically fraught, and now legally encumbered, but it is best for purposes of this essay, which is chiefly about aesthetic and cultural concerns.
* Stallman insists that this OS should always be referred to as GNU/Linux, and has perfectly good reasons for saying so, viz., so that the role of the GNU project will not go unrecognized. In practice, almost everyone refers to it as Linux. For purposes of this essay I will emphasize the role of GNU by explicitly describing it rather than by using the GNU/Linux nomenclature.
* Apologies for this section title to Steven Johnson, author of Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate, Harper San Francisco (1997) and Basic Books (1999).
* Dr. Myhrvold of Microsoft has laid down his dinosaur pick, risen to the challenge, and countered with a trenchant drill analogy of his own that spins in the opposite direction, as it were. His drill analogy is probably, in the end, better than mine. I will not present it here, because a public drill analogy duel would present a ridiculous and undignified spectacle. Here are some excerpts:
“There is a silly romanticism that a more primitive instrument that requires lots of skill from the operator must somehow be more powerful. It’s usually bullshit….”
“An important reason that Linux has become interesting is that the Internet has caused a temporarily retro phase when interesting programs are suddenly very unsophisticated. Apache, or an NNTP server, is very simple software that does not require much of an OS. The same is true for many other web-oriented tasks. Linux is fine for these.”
* In any exotic country, the best tour guide is a native who is fluent in English. Eric S. Raymond is an eminent open-source hacker who has become the foremost anthropologist of the open-source tribe. He has an ongoing series of papers, available on the web. The first and best-known is “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” The second is “Homesteading the Noosphere.” Others are planned. Probably the most reliable way of finding these papers is to visit Raymond’s website at www.tuxedo.org/~esr/
† Again, the full Stallman-compliant term for this would be “Debian GNU/ Linux.” This nomenclature is an implicit way of reminding us of something that I have here tried to state explicitly, namely that none of this would exist without GNU
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