In the Beginning...was the Command Line

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In the Beginning...was the Command Line is a lengthy essay by Neal Stephenson which was originally published online in 1999 and later made available in book form. 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 lucidly analyzes the corporate/collective culture of the Microsoft, Macintosh, and free software communities. Stephenson explores the GUI as a metaphor in terms of the increasing interposition of metaphors between humans and the actual workings of devices (in a similar manner to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) and explains the beauty hackers feel in good-quality tools. He does this with a car analogy. He compares four operating systems, Mac OS by Apple Computer to a fine European luxury car, Windows by Microsoft to a station wagon, Linux to a free tank, and BeOS to a batmobile. Stephenson argues that people continue to buy the station wagon despite free tanks being given away, because people do not want to learn how to operate a tank; they know that the station wagon dealership has a machine shop that they can take their car to when it breaks down. Because of this attitude, Stephenson argues that Microsoft is not really a monopoly, as evidenced by the free availability of other choice OS's, but rather has simply accrued enough mental shares among the people to have them coming back. He compares Microsoft to Disney, in that both are selling a vision to their customers, who in turn "want to believe" in that vision.

Stephenson spends some time discussing Debian and its impressive bug-tracking system in the essay. Debian developers were extremely pleased to find out that an author whom many of them respect uses and approves of their work. He also gives Microsoft's view on bug tracking. Initially it is impossible to find any mention of specific bugs on Microsoft's website, but later he notices that Microsoft has instated a system similar to the Debian one, though sugar-coated so as to not ruin the vision demanded by its customers.

The essay was written before the advent of Mac OS X. In a Slashdot interview on 2004-10-20, he remarked:

I embraced OS X as soon as it was available and have never looked back. So a lot of In the Beginning...was the Command Line is now obsolete. I keep meaning to update it, but if I'm honest with myself, I have to say this is unlikely.[1]

With Neal Stephenson's permission, Garrett Birkel wrote an essay in 2004 interspersing his own notes and comments throughout In the Beginning...was the Command Line to bring it more or less up-to-date as of the end of 2004; the original text remains untouched.

[edit] Factual error

In Stephenson's description of the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop development environment, he wrote:

During the late 1980's and early 1990's I spent a lot of time programming Macintoshes, and eventually decided for fork over several hundred dollars for an Apple product called the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, or MPW. MPW had competitors, but it was unquestionably the premier software development system for the Mac. It was what Apple's own engineers used to write Macintosh code. Given that MacOS was far more technologically advanced, at the time, than its competition, and that Linux did not even exist yet, and given that this was the actual program used by Apple's world-class team of creative engineers, I had high expectations
…[after running MPW]…
In other words, the first thing that Apple's hackers had done when they'd got the MacOS up and running—probably even before they'd gotten it up and running—was to re-create the Unix interface, so that they would be able to get some useful work done. At the time, I simply couldn't get my mind around this, but: as far as Apple's hackers were concerned, the Mac's vaunted Graphical User Interface was an impediment, something to be circumvented before the little toaster even came out onto the market.

MPW did not exist at the time the original Macintosh was released in 1984—the first version of MPW did not come out until 2 years later, long after the Mac OS was already "up and running"—so the only way to write programs for the original Macintosh was to cross-compile them from a Macintosh XL, although Stephenson is correct that MPW's primary interface was CLI-style.

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Works by Neal Stephenson
Full-Length Novels The Big U (1984) | Zodiac (1988) | Snow Crash (1992) | Interface (1994) | The Diamond Age (1995) | The Cobweb (1996) | Cryptonomicon (1999) | The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver (2003), The Confusion (2004), and The System of the World (2004)
Short Stories "Spew" (1994) | "The Great Simoleon Caper" (1995) | "Jipi and the paranoid chip" (1997)
Non-Fiction Smiley's people (1993) | In the Kingdom of Mao Bell (1994) | Mother Earth Mother Board (1996) | Global Neighborhood Watch (1998) | In the Beginning...was the Command Line (1999)
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