"In The Beginning Was The Command Line" An essay by Neal Stephenson that talks about proprietary operating systems and FOSS operating systems. Written in 1999.
Stephenson, Neal ( 1999). 'In The Beginning Was The Command Line' : Neal Stephenson : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
It's a good read, but he then back on it all and went all Apple. So it's a bit bitter sweat. Snow Crash is probably better.
I knew quite a few linux fans who went with Apple laptops when OSX came out. At the time it was the best thing available that had unix under the hood which made it really powerful in the right hands.
If they were more about UNIX than freedom, that could make sense back then. These days, you miss out on loads on of open stuff and are very much a third class citizen. After Linux and Windows, as the platform has neither freedom or a large user base. Macports seams to regularly have talks about how they are shunned and ignored.
Written in 1999
Never forget that in 2001 he switched to Mac OS X and has been using it since.
That’s when Unix (Mach kernel and FreeBSD) based OSX launched. It included command line and OOP development tools that really were a huge improvement over the previous OS 7-9.
I bought my first Mac a few years later 2003 because I needed a reliable laptop, there was no competition (anyone remember the Sony Viao?) in good laptops, unless you liked thinkpads with one nipple. Plus as a design student, I needed macromedia and Adobe products, and worked in my college’s computer lab managing Mac’s anyway.
I am only a few pages in, but speaking as a Linux user in the 2020s, I am skeptical of the claim that Linux in 1999 would "never, ever break down."
I was there Gandalf...
In comparison to the alternatives we had at the time, Linux was a fucking tank. Once it was up, you could expect to get 6 months to years of uptime unless you were installing new tools or changing hardware (no real USB/SATA yet, so hardware was a reboot situation).
If you got a Win98 machine up, it would eventually just hang. Yes, some could got a whole, but if you used it for general use it would crash the kernel out eventually. Same for MacOS (the OG MacOS).
The only real completion for stability was other UNIX systems, and few of those were available to the general public at a reasonable price point.
Hell my home server, running on low end Xeon hardware had uptime numbers around 3 years....then there was a power cut. Next down day was another power cut a year or so later. Total around 8 years running with 5 outages, all but one due to power loss (other was Ubuntu 16.04 - 18.04 upgrade).
Just updated to Ubuntu server 20.04 so uptime is only 7 days at this point.
Daily updates with rolling distro may cause issues but a stable system that wasn't tinkered with would run and run and run. Our Linux fileserver at work had a 2 year uptime, only broke that for some drive additions and other adjustments, otherwise it would have just kept on chugging along without interaction. My debian ARM NAS runs without incident, the only shutdowns it sees are when I move equipment to different rooms or want to reroute power cables. Otherwise it would just always be working fine.
Our tanks break down here and there but i appreciate the compliment
I just finished this, yes it took me a month.
I found his literary style, very compelling, it was a fun read.
I found his predictions while interesting, not very clairvoyant. BeOS is sadly no longer with us.
I did like his tie-in to the Church of the simulation at the end, though this predates the official organization of such an church.
I think it was a thought-provoking essay, I disagreed with some aspects of this predictions, especially around what a monopoly is. It's thought-provoking. It's a good read. It is not gospel
He did talk about hacker culture, and anybody being able to fix anything, but was not able to make the connection between BeOS and proprietary license and Linux with an open license.
I agree with all you've said. Especially the monopoly part is where I disagreed the most. This is a good document to inform people about the ideology behind computers. Well, would be if not for those mistakes you have mentioned.
Other than those, as you have said, it's a thought-provoking essay.
Lamina1 is enough to prove Stephenson is kind of full of shit.
It's such a joke it doesn't even have its own Wikipedia entry. It's just a footnote on Stephenson's.
I'm just gonna call it like I sees it:
I put Stephenson in the same camp as Orson Scott Card.
He had a single book with some really brilliant and thoughtful ideas... and that's about it. People need money to stay alive, and can always be swayed by it.
That's not fair. Multiple books of his books are award winning. Even if you only like one, the critics rate him. Other writers, rate him.
Them again, "a single book with some really brilliant and thoughtful ideas" is one book more than most authors, much less internet commenters will ever put out.
Hang on a second. Orson Scott Card is a homophobic motherfuck. What'd NS do that is so bad?
He's into NFTs, if there's something else idk about it
Snow Crash is one of my favorite books.
I'm a Cryptonomicon person. The modern timeline is dated now, but the overall information warfare themes are delicious.
Anathem is my personal favorite. One of the very few books I've read multiple times.