books:

	• In the Beginning...was the Command Line Neal Stephenson Harper Perennial, 1999 - 160 pages average customer review:based on 100 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

This is not a book for people looking for a detailed examination of the long-running "Windows v. Mac" debate, but whether you've spent your computing life on one side of the fence or the other, or like Stephenson have jumped over it a few times, it's valuable because it's an honest, well-expressed statement of a point of view. Not inspired- certainly not the way Stephenson's fiction is- but a good, solid, short read.

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The most important non-technical computer book ever written

The title of this review may seem the height of hyperbole, but I stand behind it. I cannot find a book before this one that looked at the computer and its effects from the standpoint of users as consumers of metaphors. A search for computer books on Amazon will give interested readers hundreds of choices of books that teach every conceivable computer language and operating system. Others provide insight into the physical workings of chips, RAM and motherboards. Add to that a hundred more that explore computers and their influence on speeding and shrinking our world and you have a catalog of several thousand books dedicated to a tool that has only been around in a usable fashion for under 50 years. In all that space, nothing is ever mentioned about how the user, through the act of purchasing operating systems and software, is consciously choosing to view the world of the computer, and, therefore, the larger world, through several competing, and Stephenson would say flawed, sets of complex metaphors and symbols. This decision, based on a vast array of different impulses and needs, is a telling look at modern consumers. It is an interesting fact that the wealthiest man in the world made his money not from the hardware in a computer, but through encoded data to make the hardware perform in a usable manner for the consumer market.

So why is this so important? Because the way we choose to use the computer may be less important than the way we allow the computer to use us, i.e the manner in which we allow it to change and manipulate the ways we interact with the world. As computers become more pervasive worldwide, and more user friendly and intuitive, the more important the interface and iconography will become. It will take on the job of defining concepts that cross language and national boundaries. That is an important task for something that is still a consumer product being manipulated by individuals with their own agenda and ideas to promote.

What is truly amazing about this book is that Stephenson has written it using his characteristic wry sense of humor, making it highly readable and sometimes incredibly funny. It is understandable by both the programmer and the non-programmer alike. While some may take issue with the conclusions that Stephenson draws from his observations, few will deny that looking at the computer from this vantage is an extremely important exercise and is fundamental to our understanding of just how far the computer has changed our world.

UPDATE July 07 - I wrote the above review over five years ago. I still reread this little book every year or so. It was written before Mac OSX so it is a little dated now. However, many of the concepts stand up and, as I say in the review, looking at GUIs as a set of competing metaphors is an interesting exercise. The last time I reread it I was motivated to completely switch to open source for just about everything. It made the book that much more appealing.

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Half-baked, inaccurate, but entertaining and infuriating

This is a book that might have been written by the hero of "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius." It's entertaining and you really want to like it (and I do like Stephenson's fiction), but it's so infuriatingly inaccurate, I kept yelling at my wife "this is all wrong!" Not his opinions, in general I have no problems with those. It's all the facts that he seems to be completely indifferent to.
I would have stopped about a third of the way through but I figured he MUST be going someplace where all this would make sense. It doesn't.

Here's a fairly typical quote: "...during this century, intellectualism failed and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common folk agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir." (p. 53)
Well, intellectualism may well be useless for Disney, which is what he's discussing here, but to call Hitler and Lenin intellectuals is completely wrong. Naziism was, in fact, the first truly mass political movement, and it was precisely a call to tradition, to "blood and folk," a return to the glory of Germany's mythological past, of Siegfried and Fredrick Barbarossa.
Early in the Russian revolution, the call went out to kill everyone who didn't have calluses on their hands - everyone who was an intellectual, in other words, and not a worker. The one recognizable artistic legacy of Lenin, Soviet Realism, is the most anti-intellectual artistic style of the 20th century (aside from the "big-eyed waifs on black velvet" school of the American 70's.) You can accuse Lenin and Hitler of a lot of stuff, but they were NEVER soft on intellectuals.

He proposes this amusing metaphor that Mac is a Euro-styled sedan, Windows is a big, lumbering SUV, and LINUX is a high-tech M1 tank that never breaks down, gets wonderful mileage, and is free.
I'm fine with the Mac and Windows metaphors. LINUX might be a sort of a tank, but it's more like a tank that comes as an enormous box of erector set pieces, lincoln logs, and tinker toy parts, and it's up to you to figure out which pieces you need and how they go together. There are lots of people to ask, at least if you have another computer that's stable enough to get out onto the Internet to ask questions like "how do I figure out what UART chip my serial port card uses?"

He attempts to argue that Microsoft's fixation with operating systems is somehow unnatural, that an OS, which doesn't really "exist" except as a string on ones and zeroes on your computer disk, is somehow inherently free, and it's immoral to charge people money for it. In fact, he seems to think Gates invented the idea of selling software. "A string of ones and zeroes was not a difficult thing for Bill Gates to distribute, once he'd thought of the idea. The hard part was selling it - reassuring customers that they were actually getting something in return for their money." (This is funny partly because one of the constant refrains of the anti-Gates crowd is that 'Microsoft never invented anything, they just stole it.')
Microsoft didn't invent the idea of selling software, and they certainly didn't invent the concept of an OS as a product; Digital Research developed CP/M long before, which was used on a dozen different brands of mutually incompatible hardware, like Kaypros, and Wordstar predates DOS by years. In fact, Gates' first product wasn't an OS at all, it was an elegant implementation of the programming language BASIC.

"The operating system market is a death trap, a tar pit, a slough of despond." (p.40) This ignores, of course, that the vast Microsoft fortunes have come precisely from the sale of operating systems, and the leverage which this firehose of cash gave them to develop desktop applications. This is loony tunes.

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Neal Stephenson Brings Order To Chaos

There are books, song lyrics, TV Shows and movies that give us a vocabulary for phenomena we all recognize, but don't have a name for. A lot of the time they're just simple pop-culture references to a feeling or someone's behavior, but they're useful because they give us a shorthand to identify things that happen in our daily lives. If you spend any time on a daily basis with computers, this is just such a book.
When I first read it a couple of years ago I thought it was an entertaining read. But in the intervening years I find myself coming back to Stephenson's method of defining the differences between operating systems, and their underlying philosophies on an almost weekly basis. It has influenced my thinking to such an extent that after cleaning out my local bookstore's meager stock of the book, I turned to Amazon for another 5 copies to distribute to friends so that we can all speak the same language. I can't guarantee in a forum as big as Amazon that everyone will like it, clearly from the other reviews there are people who find it superficial. But what some might call superficial means 'accessable' to me, and no one seems to dispute that its at least entertaining. But beyond that there is some serious thought. Several operating systems are compared and evaluated, not by dry operating benchmarks but by assessing their philosophies, objectives and success or failure. The good as well as the bad of Microsoft Windows, is discussed enough that you'll hear the almost knee-jerk criticisms of Microsoft that exist at both ends of the techinical proficiency spectrum differently since you will also have a sense of the relative strengths and weaknesses of its competitors. Most people live their lives in one operating system (or if you have a Mac, Windows is likely to be thrust upon you and you might know a second if you don't dig in your heels), and most people knock the one system they know. As entertaining as it is, the real value of the book to the general reader or tech novice is that they'll be able to speak more thoughtfully and broadly on issues that even most professional techs don't trouble themselves to investigate.

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I agree with most of his points on the operating system. I still prefer the command line myself. The command line lets you concentrate on logic, not fluff.

The question on your mind is whether or not you should buy the book. Hardcore computer buffs will be disappointed because the book is not hardcore enough. The book really does not impart any new wisdom on OS development. It is just a pile of random thoughts.

Many readers in Neal's Sci Fi fan base will simply scratch their head wondering why their favorite author let off a brain fart about operating systems.

I am happy that Mr. Stephenson took time to think about this issue, and voice his opinions. However, I wouldn't put it toward the top of a must read list. Yet, if you are in the mood to read opinions about computers and the effects they have on our society...you will find it a short, sweet read.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, page 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19

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