This is "the Word" -- one man's word, certainly -- about the art (and artifice) of the state of our computer-centric existence. And considering that the "one man" is Neal Stephenson, "the hacker Hemingway" (Newsweek) -- acclaimed novelist, pragmatist, seer, nerd-friendly philosopher, and nationally bestselling author of groundbreaking literary works (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, etc., etc.) -- the word is well worth hearing. Mostly well-reasoned examination and partial rant, Stephenson's In the Beginning... was the Command Line is a thoughtful, irreverent, hilarious treatise on the cyber-culture past and present; on operating system tyrannies and downloaded popular revolutions; on the Internet, Disney World, Big Bangs, not to mention the meaning of life itself.
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No one could read a Stephenson novel and not recognise his frighteningly powerful grasp of social and political history, and of technology that underpins all his stories. Read the liner notes on Snow Crash and you'll realise this is a man who probably considers Apple's Human Interface Guidelines to be soothing bedtime reading.
In the Beginning...Was the Command Line gives Stephenson an opportunity to flex his own non-fictional muscles. Part memoir, part developer's history of operating systems, it trawls through CLIs (command line interfaces) such as MS-DOS to GUIs (graphical user interfaces), the then-as now--revolutionary Macintosh OS, and everything since: Windows 98 (note: purist Stephenson doesn't even consider this an OS), Unix and Linux.
By the end of his enlightening, exhaustive elucidation of these and other TLAs, you too may suffer the subject of one of the book's final chapters: "geek fatigue". Not to worry--if there's one thing of which you can be certain it's that Stephenson never takes himself, or his subject, too seriously, and anything that cites Dilbert cartoons and H. G. Wells as source material has got to be a giant step forward. --Liz Bailey
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Around the time that Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, and Allen were dreaming up these unlikely schemes, I was a teen living in Ames, Iowa. Read the first page
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However, like all computer science books, the technological aspect of it has already dated considerably, reducing its relevance as a survey. This is of course inevitable in such a fast-moving field. I would be very interested to read an updated edition taking into account the current situation in the OS marketplace.
Stephenson primarily contrasts Windows(tm), Linux, MacOS and BeOS. Out of these systems, BeOS is basically dead, MacOS has undergone a sea change (to a considerable extent building on BeOS and Linux), Linux has grown in sophistication and user-friendliness, and Windows is... still basically Windows with some extra knobs on it.
The book should not be ignored, though. The fundamental issue Stephenson comments on - whether it's possible to control complex equipment through simplified interfaces - is never going to disappear. It's also an entertaining read simply for the author's wonderful use of language.
The book is a very interesting thought excercise, but it feels more like a Wired article that got published in book form. At the low price though, it's a tasty intellectual snack along the road, you can probably finish it in three or four commuter train rides.
As a developer and reder of most things technical, my "time-off" comprises... Read more
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