Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 05:40:16 -0400
From: Gerald Oskoboiny <gerald@impressive.net>
To: misc people <gerald@impressive.net>
Subject: In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson
Message-ID: <19990611054015.B15167@impressive.net>

I just spent an hour or two reading "In the Beginning was the
Command Line" by Neal Stephenson.  It's about a hundred pages
of fun reading about Microsoft, Apple, BeOS, Linux and related
technology and culture.

It's available for downloading from:

    http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

(it's a single plaintext file which is available as Mac stuffit
or PC Zip formats for some strange reason.)

Here's the intro text from the web site, followed by a couple of
my favorite excerpts:

    About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of
    Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling
    information processing machines for use in the home. The
    business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and
    received the credit they deserved for being daring
    visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul
    Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more
    fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This was
    much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer
    at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It came in
    a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights
    blink. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at
    all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in
    effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. The
    product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes
    that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the
    ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and
    zeroes. Even those few who actually understood what a
    computer operating system was were apt to think of it as a
    fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder
    reactor or a U-2 spy plane, and not something that could
    ever be (in the parlance of high-tech) "productized."

[...]

    Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships
    are situated. One of them (Microsoft) is much, much bigger
    than the others. It started out years ago selling
    three-speed bicycles (MS-DOS); these were not perfect, but
    they worked, and when they broke you could easily fix them.

    There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple)
    that one day began selling motorized vehicles--expensive but
    attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically
    sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery.

    The big dealership responded by rushing a moped upgrade kit
    (the original Windows) onto the market. This was a Rube
    Goldberg contraption that, when bolted onto a three-speed
    bicycle, enabled it to keep up, just barely, with
    Apple-cars. The users had to wear goggles and were always
    picking bugs out of their teeth while Apple owners sped
    along in hermetically sealed comfort, sneering out the
    windows. But the Micro-mopeds were cheap, and easy to fix
    compared with the Apple-cars, and their market share waxed.

    Eventually the big dealership came out with a full-fledged
    car: a colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the
    aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked
    oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous success. A
    little later, they also came out with a hulking off-road
    vehicle intended for industrial users (Windows NT) which was
    no more beautiful than the station wagon, and only a little
    more reliable.

    Since then there has been a lot of noise and shouting, but
    little has changed. The smaller dealership continues to sell
    sleek Euro-styled sedans and to spend a lot of money on
    advertising campaigns. They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS!
    signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have
    gotten all yellow and curly. The big one keeps making bigger
    and bigger station wagons and ORVs.

    On the other side of the road are two competitors that have
    come along more recently.

    One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational
    Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish
    even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more
    technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as
    anything else on the market--and yet cheaper than the
    others.

    With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next
    door, and which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of
    RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and
    organized by consensus. The people who live there are making
    tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks;
    these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of
    space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology
    from one end to the other.  But they are better than Army
    tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never,
    ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on
    ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact
    car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a
    terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along
    the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who
    wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.

    Customers come to this crossroads in throngs, day and night.
    Ninety percent of them go straight to the biggest dealership
    and buy station wagons or off-road vehicles. They do not
    even look at the other dealerships.

    Of the remaining ten percent, most go and buy a sleek
    Euro-sedan, pausing only to turn up their noses at the
    philistines going to buy the station wagons and ORVs. If
    they even notice the people on the opposite side of the
    road, selling the cheaper, technically superior vehicles,
    these customers deride them cranks and half-wits.

    The Batmobile outlet sells a few vehicles to the occasional
    car nut who wants a second vehicle to go with his station
    wagon, but seems to accept, at least for now, that it's a
    fringe player.

    The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive
    because it is staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the
    edge of the street with bullhorns, trying to draw customers'
    attention to this incredible situation. A typical
    conversation goes something like this:

    Hacker with bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our
    free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks
    and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred
    miles to the gallon!"

    Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is
    true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"

    Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon
    either!"

    Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If
    something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day
    off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I
    sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator
    music."

    Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will
    send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you
    sleep!"

    Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!"

    Bullhorn: "But..."

    Buyer: "Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"

[...]

    THE HOLE HAWG OF OPERATING SYSTEMS

    Unix has always lurked provocatively in the background of
    the operating system wars, like the Russian Army. Most
    people know it only by reputation, and its reputation, as
    the Dilbert cartoon suggests, is mixed. But everyone seems
    to agree that if it could only get its act together and stop
    surrendering vast tracts of rich agricultural land and
    hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war to the onrushing
    invaders, it could stomp them (and all other opposition)
    flat.

    It is difficult to explain how Unix has earned this respect
    without going into mind-smashing technical detail. Perhaps
    the gist of it can be explained by telling a story about
    drills.

    The Hole Hawg is a drill made by the Milwaukee Tool Company.
    If you look in a typical hardware store you may find smaller
    Milwaukee drills but not the Hole Hawg, which is too
    powerful and too expensive for homeowners. The Hole Hawg
    does not have the pistol-like design of a cheap homeowner's
    drill. It is a cube of solid metal with a handle sticking
    out of one face and a chuck mounted in another. The cube
    contains a disconcertingly potent electric motor. You can
    hold the handle and operate the trigger with your index
    finger, but unless you are exceptionally strong you cannot
    control the weight of the Hole Hawg with one hand; it is a
    two-hander all the way. In order to fight off the
    counter-torque of the Hole Hawg you use a separate handle
    (provided), which you screw into one side of the iron cube
    or the other depending on whether you are using your left or
    right hand to operate the trigger. This handle is not a
    sleek, ergonomically designed item as it would be in a
    homeowner's drill. It is simply a foot-long chunk of regular
    galvanized pipe, threaded on one end, with a black rubber
    handle on the other. If you lose it, you just go to the
    local plumbing supply store and buy another chunk of pipe.

    During the Eighties I did some construction work. One day,
    another worker leaned a ladder against the outside of the
    building that we were putting up, climbed up to the
    second-story level, and used the Hole Hawg to drill a hole
    through the exterior wall. At some point, the drill bit
    caught in the wall.  The Hole Hawg, following its one and
    only imperative, kept going.  It spun the worker's body
    around like a rag doll, causing him to knock his own ladder
    down. Fortunately he kept his grip on the Hole Hawg, which
    remained lodged in the wall, and he simply dangled from it
    and shouted for help until someone came along and reinstated
    the ladder.

    I myself used a Hole Hawg to drill many holes through studs,
    which it did as a blender chops cabbage. I also used it to
    cut a few six-inch-diameter holes through an old
    lath-and-plaster ceiling. I chucked in a new hole saw, went
    up to the second story, reached down between the newly
    installed floor joists, and began to cut through the
    first-floor ceiling below. Where my homeowner's drill had
    labored and whined to spin the huge bit around, and had
    stalled at the slightest obstruction, the Hole Hawg rotated
    with the stupid consistency of a spinning planet.  When the
    hole saw seized up, the Hole Hawg spun itself and me around,
    and crushed one of my hands between the steel pipe handle
    and a joist, producing a few lacerations, each surrounded by
    a wide corona of deeply bruised flesh. It also bent the hole
    saw itself, though not so badly that I couldn't use it.
    After a few such run-ins, when I got ready to use the Hole
    Hawg my heart actually began to pound with atavistic terror.

    But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. The Hole
    Hawg is dangerous because it does exactly what you tell it
    to. It is not bound by the physical limitations that are
    inherent in a cheap drill, and neither is it limited by
    safety interlocks that might be built into a homeowner's
    product by a liability-conscious manufacturer. The danger
    lies not in the machine itself but in the user's failure to
    envision the full consequences of the instructions he gives
    to it.

    A smaller tool is dangerous too, but for a completely
    different reason: it tries to do what you tell it to, and
    fails in some way that is unpredictable and almost always
    undesirable. But the Hole Hawg is like the genie of the
    ancient fairy tales, who carries out his master's
    instructions literally and precisely and with unlimited
    power, often with disastrous, unforeseen consequences.

    Pre-Hole Hawg, I used to examine the drill selection in
    hardware stores with what I thought was a judicious eye,
    scorning the smaller low-end models and hefting the big
    expensive ones appreciatively, wishing I could afford one of
    them babies. Now I view them all with such contempt that I
    do not even consider them to be real drills--merely
    scaled-up toys designed to exploit the self-delusional
    tendencies of soft-handed homeowners who want to believe
    that they have purchased an actual tool. Their plastic
    casings, carefully designed and focus-group-tested to convey
    a feeling of solidity and power, seem disgustingly flimsy
    and cheap to me, and I am ashamed that I was ever bamboozled
    into buying such knicknacks.

    It is not hard to imagine what the world would look like to
    someone who had been raised by contractors and who had never
    used any drill other than a Hole Hawg. Such a person,
    presented with the best and most expensive hardware-store
    drill, would not even recognize it as such. He might instead
    misidentify it as a child's toy, or some kind of motorized
    screwdriver. If a salesperson or a deluded homeowner
    referred to it as a drill, he would laugh and tell them that
    they were mistaken--they simply had their terminology wrong.
    His interlocutor would go away irritated, and probably
    feeling rather defensive about his basement full of cheap,
    dangerous, flashy, colorful tools.

    Unix is the Hole Hawg of operating systems, and Unix
    hackers, like Doug Barnes and the guy in the Dilbert cartoon
    and many of the other people who populate Silicon Valley,
    are like contractor's sons who grew up using only Hole
    Hawgs. They might use Apple/Microsoft OSes to write letters,
    play video games, or balance their checkbooks, but they
    cannot really bring themselves to take these operating
    systems seriously.

[ The Dilbert cartoon mentioned above, incidentally, is the one
  I've had on my home page for the last year and a half ;-) ]

-- 
Gerald Oskoboiny <gerald@impressive.net>
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/