In the Beginning...Was the Command Line (12 page)
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Authors: Neal Stephenson
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.
EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2007 ISBN: 9780061832901
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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