In the Beginning...Was the Command Line
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.
Stats for nerds
52recommend
134mentions
110people
2007–2026years
43% recommend54% neutral4% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Honestly, IMHO it's complete and utter crap compared to the AMAZING, INCREDIBLE work Stephenson did with everything that came before.
Snow Crash? A milestone in modern sci-fi. Diamond Age? A truly incredible work of art! Even lesser stuff like The Big U or In the Beginning Was the Command Line were really, really good.
Then came Cryptonomicon, and it was good too ... but he was already deteriorating into loving the sound of his own voice way too much by then, so you had to wade through a bit to get to the good stuff.
And then there was Anathem ... where he made up half a language and required you to learn it to read the book (and it was like ten zillion pages long). Good writing is NOT about just throwing whatever brilliant ideas you have onto the page ... it's about cutting it down to the good stuff. Stephenson just stopped doing that by the time he got to Anathem.
To be fair, lots of people were willing to wade through all that fake language BS and Stephenson writing 100 words when 10 would do, and they all report loving the book ... but as a complete and utter Stephenson fanatic, even I abandonded him at Anathem.
- I recommend his older stuff to anyone else looking to check him out: Snow Crash is an undeniable classic, Diamond Age was absolutely incredible, and even Zodiac and In the Beginning Was the Command Line are both very good (although the last one is obviously more for computer people).
His newer stuff is very ... verbose. It started with Cryptonomicon (not sci-fi and WAY longer than it should have been) and by the time he got to Anathema he was so full of himself he not only wrote a giant text ... he wrote it in a made-up sub-language he created (and expected you to learn) just to enjoy the story.
He's one of my absolute favorite authors ... or at least he was for the first half of his career.
- Also, In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt
Excerpts where he explains: "Now this was technically a fault in the application (Word 6.0 for the Macintosh) not the operating system (MacOS 7 point something) and so the initial target of my annoyance was the people who were responsible for Word. But. On the other hand, I could have chosen the "save as text" option in Word and saved all of my documents as simple telegrams, and this problem would not have arisen. Instead I had allowed myself to be seduced by all of those flashy formatting options that hadn't even existed until GUIs had come along to make them practicable. I had gotten into the habit of using them to make my documents look pretty (perhaps prettier than they deserved to look; all of the old documents on those floppies turned out to be more or less crap). Now I was paying the price for that self-indulgence. Technology had moved on and found ways to make my documents look even prettier, and the consequence of it was that all old ugly documents had ceased to exist."
and
"When my Powerbook broke my heart, and when Word stopped recognizing my old files, I jumped to Unix. The obvious alternative to MacOS would have been Windows. I didn't really have anything against Microsoft, or Windows. But it was pretty obvious, now, that old PC operating systems were overreaching, and showing the strain, and, perhaps, were best avoided until they had learned to walk and chew gum at the same time.
The changeover took place on a particular day in the summer of 1995. I had been San Francisco for a couple of weeks, using my PowerBook to work on a document. The document was too big to fit onto a single floppy, and so I hadn't made a backup since leaving home. The PowerBook crashed and wiped out the entire file.
It happened just as I was on my way out the door to visit a company called Electric Communities, which in those days was in Los Altos. I took my PowerBook with me. My friends at Electric Communities were Mac users who had all sorts of utility software for unerasing files and recovering from disk crashes, and I was certain I could get most of the file back.
As it turned out, two different Mac crash recovery utilities were unable to find any trace that my file had ever existed. It was completely and systematically wiped out. We went through that hard disk block by block and found disjointed fragments of countless old, discarded, forgotten files, but none of what I wanted. The metaphor shear was especially brutal that day. It was sort of like watching the girl you've been in love with for ten years get killed in a car wreck, and then attending her autopsy, and learning that underneath the clothes and makeup she was just flesh and blood."
- > They use Emacs because they read that Neal Stephenson essay and they feel VS Code is for normies and Emacs is Gnostic.
hit really close to home for me. When I read it I was coding on Windows, and at the time and it didn't have great support for CLI. But reading "In the Beginning... Was the Command Line" got me to really appreciate what could be done
- Somewhat tangential: this reminded me of Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line" [1] which speaks highly of BeOS.
I liked the bug report "R4: BeOS missing megalomaniacal figurehead to harness and focus developer rage" (:
- > confidently claiming that all linux users switched to Mac
I did not say that. I did not say anything resembling that. It's an absurd claim.
What I said was:
«All the professionals evangelising Linux in the 20th century have moved to Macs now»
Which followed, and was in the context of, the sentence:
«reading other people's writing about it and where possible talking to them.»
In other words: the professional Linux advocates -- that means, the people who were advocating and recommending Linux to non-Linux users –- that I read and knew and sometimes have talked to -- switched.
Not people in the Linux biz talking to other people in the biz.
People like author Charlie Stross, who is occasionally cstross on here, who for years wrote the Linux column in the UK edition of Computer Shopper and was as such perhaps the most visible UK tech journalist writing about and recommending Linux.
Or Neal Stephenson, author of the seminal "In the Beginning was the Command Line", which if you have not read recently you need to.
Here's a free copy.
https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt
Mac users now.
Context is important and must be considered. You apparently did not.
> and how Mac is the be-all end-all of computers.
I didn't say that either.
It's got a damned good case to be the most sophisticated general-purpose desktop/laptop there's ever been, though, and it's held that place pretty much the entire century so far.
Tastes differ. Not everyone likes it. That's fine. I am not saying everyone should.
But I'm saying that if you read the widest possible range of OS and UI discussion and debate, there is a fairly clear consensus that what was Mac OS X and is now macOS is, while flawed, about the best there is.
