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A review by billcoffin
In the Beginning...Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson
2.0
Neal Stephenson, a guy with no small degree of technical knowledge when it comes to computers, published this essay/book in 1999, at a time when the Internet was old but the World Wide Web was new (and changing everything), and when Apple was having its second Steve Jobs halcyon, on the verge of launching iTunes, the iPod, and creating the kind of retail tsunami from what Stephenson would derisively call "hermetically sealed" operations systems.
And for all this, what we get from "In the Beginning...Was the Command Line" is a wandering manifesto from a guy who disdains Windows, had his heart broken by Mac (after a disastrous hard drive crash) and fell in love with Unix so hard that you kind of wonder why he doesn't just marry it.
The worst part is that throughout this book< Stepehenson shows himself not as a knowledgeable tech guy with the inside track on a great alternative to the two big OSs on the market. Rather, he comes off as a guy who is merely pining for the good old days when computers were arcane, required guys who were both wizards and mechanics to make them run properly, and who enjoyed a goodly deal of power from all that. And if not power, at least the smug self-satisfaction in knowing that the whole world ran on machines that needed nerds like him to keep in proper order.
And you get that maybe Stephenson senses what is coming, and this is his last, spasmic love letter to a tradition wherein the only real way to use your computer, the only way that is respectable, the only way that doesn't just reduce you to some kind of simpering prole, is to know how to write code from the ground up. And since Windows and Mac doesn't really allow you to do that as openly as a guy like Stephenson might want, Unix in general, and Linux in particular, has become the One True Way.
Too bad the rest of you confused children just don't see it yet, his book seems to say, and it both pats us on the head for not getting the message while simultaneously spitting in our Starbucks for being too stupid to care. After a while, you get the feeling that if you're going to endure this level of sly condescension, you might as well hang out at a comic shop or something.
What Stephenson seems to miss is that for a lot of people, computers have simply become another retail product that we use on the terms dictated by the manufacturer. And why? Because we mostly need computers to do six to eight things for us. We don't really care how it all works under the hood. We just need out office/internet/YouTube/game/music machines to work in a way that makes us feel comfortable. And all the eye-rolling comparisons to the vapid, fake authenticity to DisneyWorld won't do a damned thing to change that.
And for all this, what we get from "In the Beginning...Was the Command Line" is a wandering manifesto from a guy who disdains Windows, had his heart broken by Mac (after a disastrous hard drive crash) and fell in love with Unix so hard that you kind of wonder why he doesn't just marry it.
The worst part is that throughout this book< Stepehenson shows himself not as a knowledgeable tech guy with the inside track on a great alternative to the two big OSs on the market. Rather, he comes off as a guy who is merely pining for the good old days when computers were arcane, required guys who were both wizards and mechanics to make them run properly, and who enjoyed a goodly deal of power from all that. And if not power, at least the smug self-satisfaction in knowing that the whole world ran on machines that needed nerds like him to keep in proper order.
And you get that maybe Stephenson senses what is coming, and this is his last, spasmic love letter to a tradition wherein the only real way to use your computer, the only way that is respectable, the only way that doesn't just reduce you to some kind of simpering prole, is to know how to write code from the ground up. And since Windows and Mac doesn't really allow you to do that as openly as a guy like Stephenson might want, Unix in general, and Linux in particular, has become the One True Way.
Too bad the rest of you confused children just don't see it yet, his book seems to say, and it both pats us on the head for not getting the message while simultaneously spitting in our Starbucks for being too stupid to care. After a while, you get the feeling that if you're going to endure this level of sly condescension, you might as well hang out at a comic shop or something.
What Stephenson seems to miss is that for a lot of people, computers have simply become another retail product that we use on the terms dictated by the manufacturer. And why? Because we mostly need computers to do six to eight things for us. We don't really care how it all works under the hood. We just need out office/internet/YouTube/game/music machines to work in a way that makes us feel comfortable. And all the eye-rolling comparisons to the vapid, fake authenticity to DisneyWorld won't do a damned thing to change that.