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- In the Beginning was the Command Line
- by Neal Stephenson
- 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."
- Yet now the company that Gates and Allen founded is selling operating
- systems like Gillette sells razor blades. New releases of operating systems
- are launched as if they were Hollywood blockbusters, with celebrity
- endorsements, talk show appearances, and world tours. The market for them
- is vast enough that people worry about whether it has been monopolized by
- one company. Even the least technically-minded people in our society now
- have at least a hazy idea of what operating systems do; what is more, they
- have strong opinions about their relative merits. It is commonly
- understood, even by technically unsophisticated computer users, that if you
- have a piece of software that works on your Macintosh, and you move it over
- onto a Windows machine, it will not run. That this would, in fact, be a
- laughable and idiotic mistake, like nailing horseshoes to the tires of a
- Buick.
- A person who went into a coma before Microsoft was founded, and woke up
- now, could pick up this morning's New York Times and understand everything
- in it--almost:
- * Item: the richest man in the world made his fortune from-what?
- Railways? Shipping? Oil? No, operating systems.
- * Item: the Department of Justice is tackling Microsoft's supposed OS
- monopoly with legal tools that were invented to restrain the power of
- Nineteenth-Century robber barons.
- * Item: a woman friend of mine recently told me that she'd broken off a
- (hitherto) stimulating exchange of e-mail with a young man. At first
- he had seemed like such an intelligent and interesting guy, she said,
- but then "he started going all PC-versus-Mac on me."
- What the hell is going on here? And does the operating system business have
- a future, or only a past? Here is my view, which is entirely subjective;
- but since I have spent a fair amount of time not only using, but
- programming, Macintoshes, Windows machines, Linux boxes and the BeOS,
- perhaps it is not so ill-informed as to be completely worthless. This is a
- subjective essay, more review than research paper, and so it might seem
- unfair or biased compared to the technical reviews you can find in PC
- magazines. But ever since the Mac came out, our operating systems have been
- based on metaphors, and anything with metaphors in it is fair game as far
- as I'm concerned.
- MGBs, TANKS, AND BATMOBILES
- Around the time that Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, and Allen were dreaming up these
- unlikely schemes, I was a teenager living in Ames, Iowa. One of my friends'
- dads had an old MGB sports car rusting away in his garage. Sometimes he
- would actually manage to get it running and then he would take us for a
- spin around the block, with a memorable look of wild youthful exhiliration
- on his face; to his worried passengers, he was a madman, stalling and
- backfiring around Ames, Iowa and eating the dust of rusty Gremlins and
- Pintos, but in his own mind he was Dustin Hoffman tooling across the Bay
- Bridge with the wind in his hair.
- In retrospect, this was telling me two things about people's relationship
- to technology. One was that romance and image go a long way towards shaping
- their opinions. If you doubt it (and if you have a lot of spare time on
- your hands) just ask anyone who owns a Macintosh and who, on those grounds,
- imagines him- or herself to be a member of an oppressed minority group.
- The other, somewhat subtler point, was that interface is very important.
- Sure, the MGB was a lousy car in almost every way that counted: balky,
- unreliable, underpowered. But it was fun to drive. It was responsive. Every
- pebble on the road was felt in the bones, every nuance in the pavement
- transmitted instantly to the driver's hands. He could listen to the engine
- and tell what was wrong with it. The steering responded immediately to
- commands from his hands. To us passengers it was a pointless exercise in
- going nowhere--about as interesting as peering over someone's shoulder
- while he punches numbers into a spreadsheet. But to the driver it was an
- experience. For a short time he was extending his body and his senses into
- a larger realm, and doing things that he couldn't do unassisted.
- The analogy between cars and operating systems is not half bad, and so let
- me run with it for a moment, as a way of giving an executive summary of our
- situation today.
- 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?"
- BIT-FLINGER
- The connection between cars, and ways of interacting with computers,
- wouldn't have occurred to me at the time I was being taken for rides in
- that MGB. I had signed up to take a computer programming class at Ames High
- School. After a few introductory lectures, we students were granted
- admission into a tiny room containing a teletype, a telephone, and an
- old-fashioned modem consisting of a metal box with a pair of rubber cups on
- the top (note: many readers, making their way through that last sentence,
- probably felt an initial pang of dread that this essay was about to turn
- into a tedious, codgerly reminiscence about how tough we had it back in the
- old days; rest assured that I am actually positioning my pieces on the
- chessboard, as it were, in preparation to make a point about truly hip and
- up-to-the minute topics like Open Source Software). The teletype was
- exactly the same sort of machine that had been used, for decades, to send
- and receive telegrams. It was basically a loud typewriter that could only
- produce UPPERCASE LETTERS. Mounted to one side of it was a smaller machine
- with a long reel of paper tape on it, and a clear plastic hopper
- underneath.
- In order to connect this device (which was not a computer at all) to the
- Iowa State University mainframe across town, you would pick up the phone,
- dial the computer's number, listen for strange noises, and then slam the
- handset down into the rubber cups. If your aim was true, one would wrap its
- neoprene lips around the earpiece and the other around the mouthpiece,
- consummating a kind of informational soixante-neuf. The teletype would
- shudder as it was possessed by the spirit of the distant mainframe, and
- begin to hammer out cryptic messages.
- Since computer time was a scarce resource, we used a sort of batch
- processing technique. Before dialing the phone, we would turn on the tape
- puncher (a subsidiary machine bolted to the side of the teletype) and type
- in our programs. Each time we depressed a key, the teletype would bash out
- a letter on the paper in front of us, so we could read what we'd typed; but
- at the same time it would convert the letter into a set of eight binary
- digits, or bits, and punch a corresponding pattern of holes across the
- width of a paper tape. The tiny disks of paper knocked out of the tape
- would flutter down into the clear plastic hopper, which would slowly fill
- up what can only be described as actual bits. On the last day of the school
- year, the smartest kid in the class (not me) jumped out from behind his
- desk and flung several quarts of these bits over the head of our teacher,
- like confetti, as a sort of semi-affectionate practical joke. The image of
- this man sitting there, gripped in the opening stages of an atavistic
- fight-or-flight reaction, with millions of bits (megabytes) sifting down
- out of his hair and into his nostrils and mouth, his face gradually turning
- purple as he built up to an explosion, is the single most memorable scene
- from my formal education.
- Anyway, it will have been obvious that my interaction with the computer was
- of an extremely formal nature, being sharply divided up into different
- phases, viz.: (1) sitting at home with paper and pencil, miles and miles
- from any computer, I would think very, very hard about what I wanted the
- computer to do, and translate my intentions into a computer language--a
- series of alphanumeric symbols on a page. (2) I would carry this across a
- sort of informational cordon sanitaire (three miles of snowdrifts) to
- school and type those letters into a machine--not a computer--which would
- convert the symbols into binary numbers and record them visibly on a tape.
- (3) Then, through the rubber-cup modem, I would cause those numbers to be
- sent to the university mainframe, which would (4) do arithmetic on them and
- send different numbers back to the teletype. (5) The teletype would convert
- these numbers back into letters and hammer them out on a page and (6) I,
- watching, would construe the letters as meaningful symbols.
- The division of responsibilities implied by all of this is admirably clean:
- computers do arithmetic on bits of information. Humans construe the bits as
- meaningful symbols. But this distinction is now being blurred, or at least
- complicated, by the advent of modern operating systems that use, and
- frequently abuse, the power of metaphor to make computers accessible to a
- larger audience. Along the way--possibly because of those metaphors, which
- make an operating system a sort of work of art--people start to get
- emotional, and grow attached to pieces of software in the way that my
- friend's dad did to his MGB.
- People who have only interacted with computers through graphical user
- interfaces like the MacOS or Windows--which is to say, almost everyone who
- has ever used a computer--may have been startled, or at least bemused, to
- hear about the telegraph machine that I used to communicate with a computer
- in 1973. But there was, and is, a good reason for using this particular
- kind of technology. Human beings have various ways of communicating to each
- other, such as music, art, dance, and facial expressions, but some of these
- are more amenable than others to being expressed as strings of symbols.
- Written language is the easiest of all, because, of course, it consists of
- strings of symbols to begin with. If the symbols happen to belong to a
- phonetic alphabet (as opposed to, say, ideograms), converting them into
- bits is a trivial procedure, and one that was nailed, technologically, in
- the early nineteenth century, with the introduction of Morse code and other
- forms of telegraphy.
- We had a human/computer interface a hundred years before we had computers.
- When computers came into being around the time of the Second World War,
- humans, quite naturally, communicated with them by simply grafting them on
- to the already-existing technologies for translating letters into bits and
- vice versa: teletypes and punch card machines.
- These embodied two fundamentally different approaches to computing. When
- you were using cards, you'd punch a whole stack of them and run them
- through the reader all at once, which was called batch processing. You
- could also do batch processing with a teletype, as I have already
- described, by using the paper tape reader, and we were certainly encouraged
- to use this approach when I was in high school. But--though efforts were
- made to keep us unaware of this--the teletype could do something that the
- card reader could not. On the teletype, once the modem link was
- established, you could just type in a line and hit the return key. The
- teletype would send that line to the computer, which might or might not
- respond with some lines of its own, which the teletype would hammer
- out--producing, over time, a transcript of your exchange with the machine.
- This way of doing it did not even have a name at the time, but when, much
- later, an alternative became available, it was retroactively dubbed the
- Command Line Interface.
- When I moved on to college, I did my computing in large, stifling rooms
- where scores of students would sit in front of slightly updated versions of
- the same machines and write computer programs: these used dot-matrix
- printing mechanisms, but were (from the computer's point of view) identical
- to the old teletypes. By that point, computers were better at
- time-sharing--that is, mainframes were still mainframes, but they were
- better at communicating with a large number of terminals at once.
- Consequently, it was no longer necessary to use batch processing. Card
- readers were shoved out into hallways and boiler rooms, and batch
- processing became a nerds-only kind of thing, and consequently took on a
- certain eldritch flavor among those of us who even knew it existed. We were
- all off the Batch, and on the Command Line, interface now--my very first
- shift in operating system paradigms, if only I'd known it.
- A huge stack of accordion-fold paper sat on the floor underneath each one
- of these glorified teletypes, and miles of paper shuddered through their
- platens. Almost all of this paper was thrown away or recycled without ever
- having been touched by ink--an ecological atrocity so glaring that those
- machines soon replaced by video terminals--so-called "glass
- teletypes"--which were quieter and didn't waste paper. Again, though, from
- the computer's point of view these were indistinguishable from World War
- II-era teletype machines. In effect we still used Victorian technology to
- communicate with computers until about 1984, when the Macintosh was
- introduced with its Graphical User Interface. Even after that, the Command
- Line continued to exist as an underlying stratum--a sort of brainstem
- reflex--of many modern computer systems all through the heyday of Graphical
- User Interfaces, or GUIs as I will call them from now on.
- GUIs
- Now the first job that any coder needs to do when writing a new piece of
- software is to figure out how to take the information that is being worked
- with (in a graphics program, an image; in a spreadsheet, a grid of numbers)
- and turn it into a linear string of bytes. These strings of bytes are
- commonly called files or (somewhat more hiply) streams. They are to
- telegrams what modern humans are to Cro-Magnon man, which is to say the
- same thing under a different name. All that you see on your computer
- screen--your Tomb Raider, your digitized voice mail messages, faxes, and
- word processing documents written in thirty-seven different typefaces--is
- still, from the computer's point of view, just like telegrams, except much
- longer, and demanding of more arithmetic.
- The quickest way to get a taste of this is to fire up your web browser,
- visit a site, and then select the View/Document Source menu item. You will
- get a bunch of computer code that looks something like this:
- <HTML>
- <HEAD>
- <TITLE>Welcome to the Avon Books Homepage</TITLE>
- </HEAD>
- <MAP NAME="left0199">
- <AREA SHAPE="rect" COORDS="16,56,111,67" HREF="/bard/">
- <AREA SHAPE="rect" COORDS="14,77,111,89" HREF="/eos/">
- <AREA SHAPE="rect" COORDS="17,98,112,110" HREF="/twilight/">
- <AREA SHAPE="rect" COORDS="18,119,112,131"
- HREF="/avon_user/category.html?category_id=271">
- <AREA SHAPE="rect" COORDS="19,140,112,152"
- HREF="http://www.goners.com/">
- <AREA SHAPE="rect" COORDS="18,161,111,173"
- HREF="http://www.spikebooks.com/">
- <AREA SHAPE="rect" COORDS="2,181,112,195"
- HREF="/avon_user/category.html?category_id=277">
- <AREA SHAPE="rect" COORDS="9,203,112,216" HREF="/chathamisland/">
- <AREA SHAPE="rect" COORDS="7,223,112,236"
- HREF="/avon_user/search.html">
- </MAP>
- <BODY TEXT="#478CFF" LINK="#FFFFFF" VLINK="#000000" ALINK="#478CFF"
- BGCOLOR="#003399">
- <TABLE BORDER="0" WIDTH="600" CELLPADDING="0" CELLSPACING="0">
- <TR VALIGN=TOP>
- <TD ROWSPAN="3">
- <A HREF="/cgi-bin/imagemap/maps/left.gif.map"><IMG
- SRC="/avon/images/home/nav/left0199.gif" WIDTH="113" HEIGHT="280"
- BORDER="0" USEMAP="#left0199"></A></TD><TD ROWSPAN="3"><IMG
- SRC="/avon/images/home/homepagejan98/2ndleft.gif" WIDTH="144" HEIGHT="280"
- BORDER="0"></TD><TD><A HREF="/avon/about.html"><IMG
- SRC="/avon/images/home/homepagejan98/aboutavon.gif" ALT="About Avon Books"
- WIDTH="199" HEIGHT="44" BORDER="0"></A></TD><TD ROWSPAN="3"><A
- HREF="/avon/fiction/guides.html"><IMG
- SRC="/avon/images/home/feb98/right1.gif" ALT="Reading Groups" WIDTH="165"
- HEIGHT="121" BORDER="0"></A><BR><A
- HREF="/avon/feature/feb99/crook.html"><IMG
- SRC="/avon/images/home/feb99/crook_text.gif" ALT="The Crook Factory"
- WIDTH="165" HEIGHT="96" BORDER="0"></A><BR><A
- HREF="http://apps.hearstnewmedia.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+APPSSURVEYS
- Questionnaire?domain_id=182&survey_id=541"><IMG
- SRC="/avon/images/home/feb99/env_text.gif" ALT="The Envelope Please"
- WIDTH="165" HEIGHT="63" BORDER="0"></A></TD>
- </TR>
- <TR VALIGN=TOP><TD><IMG SRC="/avon/images/home/feb98/main.gif" WIDTH="199"
- HEIGHT="182" BORDER="0"></TD></TR><TR VALIGN=TOP><TD><A
- HREF="/avon/feature/jan99/sitchin.html"><IMG
- SRC="/avon/images/home/jan99/sitchin_text.gif" WIDTH="199" HEIGHT="54"
- BORDER="0"></A></TD></TR><TR VALIGN=TOP><TD COLSPAN="4"><IMG
- SRC="/avon/images/home/jan99/avon_bottom_beau.gif" WIDTH="622" HEIGHT="179"
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- HREF="/avon/policy.html">Privacy Policy</A></FONT>
- <P>
- </FONT></TD>
- </TR>
- </TABLE>
- </BODY>
- </HTML>
- This crud is called HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and it is basically a
- very simple programming language instructing your web browser how to draw a
- page on a screen. Anyone can learn HTML and many people do. The important
- thing is that no matter what splendid multimedia web pages they might
- represent, HTML files are just telegrams.
- When Ronald Reagan was a radio announcer, he used to call baseball games by
- reading the terse descriptions that trickled in over the telegraph wire and
- were printed out on a paper tape. He would sit there, all by himself in a
- padded room with a microphone, and the paper tape would eke out of the
- machine and crawl over the palm of his hand printed with cryptic
- abbreviations. If the count went to three and two, Reagan would describe
- the scene as he saw it in his mind's eye: "The brawny left-hander steps out
- of the batter's box to wipe the sweat from his brow. The umpire steps
- forward to sweep the dirt from home plate." and so on. When the cryptogram
- on the paper tape announced a base hit, he would whack the edge of the
- table with a pencil, creating a little sound effect, and describe the arc
- of the ball as if he could actually see it. His listeners, many of whom
- presumably thought that Reagan was actually at the ballpark watching the
- game, would reconstruct the scene in their minds according to his
- descriptions.
- This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy
- description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan. The
- same is true of Graphical User Interfaces in general.
- So an OS is a stack of metaphors and abstractions that stands between you
- and the telegrams, and embodying various tricks the programmer used to
- convert the information you're working with--be it images, e-mail messages,
- movies, or word processing documents--into the necklaces of bytes that are
- the only things computers know how to work with. When we used actual
- telegraph equipment (teletypes) or their higher-tech substitutes ("glass
- teletypes," or the MS-DOS command line) to work with our computers, we were
- very close to the bottom of that stack. When we use most modern operating
- systems, though, our interaction with the machine is heavily mediated.
- Everything we do is interpreted and translated time and again as it works
- its way down through all of the metaphors and abstractions.
- The Macintosh OS was a revolution in both the good and bad senses of that
- word. Obviously it was true that command line interfaces were not for
- everyone, and that it would be a good thing to make computers more
- accessible to a less technical audience--if not for altruistic reasons,
- then because those sorts of people constituted an incomparably vaster
- market. It was clear the the Mac's engineers saw a whole new country
- stretching out before them; you could almost hear them muttering, "Wow! We
- don't have to be bound by files as linear streams of bytes anymore, vive la
- revolution, let's see how far we can take this!" No command line interface
- was available on the Macintosh; you talked to it with the mouse, or not at
- all. This was a statement of sorts, a credential of revolutionary purity.
- It seemed that the designers of the Mac intended to sweep Command Line
- Interfaces into the dustbin of history.
- My own personal love affair with the Macintosh began in the spring of 1984
- in a computer store in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, when a friend of
- mine--coincidentally, the son of the MGB owner--showed me a Macintosh
- running MacPaint, the revolutionary drawing program. It ended in July of
- 1995 when I tried to save a big important file on my Macintosh Powerbook
- and instead instead of doing so, it annihilated the data so thoroughly that
- two different disk crash utility programs were unable to find any trace
- that it had ever existed. During the intervening ten years, I had a passion
- for the MacOS that seemed righteous and reasonable at the time but in
- retrospect strikes me as being exactly the same sort of goofy infatuation
- that my friend's dad had with his car.
- The introduction of the Mac triggered a sort of holy war in the computer
- world. Were GUIs a brilliant design innovation that made computers more
- human-centered and therefore accessible to the masses, leading us toward an
- unprecedented revolution in human society, or an insulting bit of
- audiovisual gimcrackery dreamed up by flaky Bay Area hacker types that
- stripped computers of their power and flexibility and turned the noble and
- serious work of computing into a childish video game?
- This debate actually seems more interesting to me today than it did in the
- mid-1980s. But people more or less stopped debating it when Microsoft
- endorsed the idea of GUIs by coming out with the first Windows. At this
- point, command-line partisans were relegated to the status of silly old
- grouches, and a new conflict was touched off, between users of MacOS and
- users of Windows.
- There was plenty to argue about. The first Macintoshes looked different
- from other PCs even when they were turned off: they consisted of one box
- containing both CPU (the part of the computer that does arithmetic on bits)
- and monitor screen. This was billed, at the time, as a philosophical
- statement of sorts: Apple wanted to make the personal computer into an
- appliance, like a toaster. But it also reflected the purely technical
- demands of running a graphical user interface. In a GUI machine, the chips
- that draw things on the screen have to be integrated with the computer's
- central processing unit, or CPU, to a far greater extent than is the case
- with command-line interfaces, which until recently didn't even know that
- they weren't just talking to teletypes.
- This distinction was of a technical and abstract nature, but it became
- clearer when the machine crashed (it is commonly the case with technologies
- that you can get the best insight about how they work by watching them
- fail). When everything went to hell and the CPU began spewing out random
- bits, the result, on a CLI machine, was lines and lines of perfectly formed
- but random characters on the screen--known to cognoscenti as "going
- Cyrillic." But to the MacOS, the screen was not a teletype, but a place to
- put graphics; the image on the screen was a bitmap, a literal rendering of
- the contents of a particular portion of the computer's memory. When the
- computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was
- something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set--a
- "snow crash."
- And even after the introduction of Windows, the underlying differences
- endured; when a Windows machine got into trouble, the old command-line
- interface would fall down over the GUI like an asbestos fire curtain
- sealing off the proscenium of a burning opera. When a Macintosh got into
- trouble it presented you with a cartoon of a bomb, which was funny the
- first time you saw it.
- And these were by no means superficial differences. The reversion of
- Windows to a CLI when it was in distress proved to Mac partisans that
- Windows was nothing more than a cheap facade, like a garish afghan flung
- over a rotted-out sofa. They were disturbed and annoyed by the sense that
- lurking underneath Windows' ostensibly user-friendly interface
- was--literally--a subtext.
- For their part, Windows fans might have made the sour observation that all
- computers, even Macintoshes, were built on that same subtext, and that the
- refusal of Mac owners to admit that fact to themselves seemed to signal a
- willingness, almost an eagerness, to be duped.
- Anyway, a Macintosh had to switch individual bits in the memory chips on
- the video card, and it had to do it very fast, and in arbitrarily
- complicated patterns. Nowadays this is cheap and easy, but in the
- technological regime that prevailed in the early 1980s, the only realistic
- way to do it was to build the motherboard (which contained the CPU) and the
- video system (which contained the memory that was mapped onto the screen)
- as a tightly integrated whole--hence the single, hermetically sealed case
- that made the Macintosh so distinctive.
- When Windows came out, it was conspicuous for its ugliness, and its current
- successors, Windows 95 and Windows NT, are not things that people would pay
- money to look at either. Microsoft's complete disregard for aesthetics gave
- all of us Mac-lovers plenty of opportunities to look down our noses at
- them. That Windows looked an awful lot like a direct ripoff of MacOS gave
- us a burning sense of moral outrage to go with it. Among people who really
- knew and appreciated computers (hackers, in Steven Levy's non-pejorative
- sense of that word) and in a few other niches such as professional
- musicians, graphic artists and schoolteachers, the Macintosh, for a while,
- was simply the computer. It was seen as not only a superb piece of
- engineering, but an embodiment of certain ideals about the use of
- technology to benefit mankind, while Windows was seen as a pathetically
- clumsy imitation and a sinister world domination plot rolled into one. So
- very early, a pattern had been established that endures to this day: people
- dislike Microsoft, which is okay; but they dislike it for reasons that are
- poorly considered, and in the end, self-defeating.
- CLASS STRUGGLE ON THE DESKTOP
- Now that the Third Rail has been firmly grasped, it is worth reviewing some
- basic facts here: like any other publicly traded, for-profit corporation,
- Microsoft has, in effect, borrowed a bunch of money from some people (its
- stockholders) in order to be in the bit business. As an officer of that
- corporation, Bill Gates has one responsibility only, which is to maximize
- return on investment. He has done this incredibly well. Any actions taken
- in the world by Microsoft-any software released by them, for example--are
- basically epiphenomena, which can't be interpreted or understood except
- insofar as they reflect Bill Gates's execution of his one and only
- responsibility.
- It follows that if Microsoft sells goods that are aesthetically
- unappealing, or that don't work very well, it does not mean that they are
- (respectively) philistines or half-wits. It is because Microsoft's
- excellent management has figured out that they can make more money for
- their stockholders by releasing stuff with obvious, known imperfections
- than they can by making it beautiful or bug-free. This is annoying, but (in
- the end) not half so annoying as watching Apple inscrutably and
- relentlessly destroy itself.
- Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it
- blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful,
- and disdainful people who think it's tacky. This is all strongly
- reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie
- were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money,
- and by the intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn
- ornaments. Microsoft is the very embodiment of modern high-tech
- prosperity--it is, in a word, bourgeois--and so it attracts all of the same
- gripes.
- The opening "splash screen" for Microsoft Word 6.0 summed it up pretty
- neatly: when you started up the program you were treated to a picture of an
- expensive enamel pen lying across a couple of sheets of fancy-looking
- handmade writing paper. It was obviously a bid to make the software look
- classy, and it might have worked for some, but it failed for me, because
- the pen was a ballpoint, and I'm a fountain pen man. If Apple had done it,
- they would've used a Mont Blanc fountain pen, or maybe a Chinese
- calligraphy brush. And I doubt that this was an accident. Recently I spent
- a while re-installing Windows NT on one of my home computers, and many
- times had to double-click on the "Control Panel" icon. For reasons that are
- difficult to fathom, this icon consists of a picture of a clawhammer and a
- chisel or screwdriver resting on top of a file folder.
- These aesthetic gaffes give one an almost uncontrollable urge to make fun
- of Microsoft, but again, it is all beside the point--if Microsoft had done
- focus group testing of possible alternative graphics, they probably would
- have found that the average mid-level office worker associated fountain
- pens with effete upper management toffs and was more comfortable with
- ballpoints. Likewise, the regular guys, the balding dads of the world who
- probably bear the brunt of setting up and maintaining home computers, can
- probably relate better to a picture of a clawhammer--while perhaps
- harboring fantasies of taking a real one to their balky computers.
- This is the only way I can explain certain peculiar facts about the current
- market for operating systems, such as that ninety percent of all customers
- continue to buy station wagons off the Microsoft lot while free tanks are
- there for the taking, right across the street.
- A string of ones and zeroes was not a difficult thing for Bill Gates to
- distribute, one 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.
- Anyone who has ever bought a piece of software in a store has had the
- curiously deflating experience of taking the bright shrink-wrapped box
- home, tearing it open, finding that it's 95 percent air, throwing away all
- the little cards, party favors, and bits of trash, and loading the disk
- into the computer. The end result (after you've lost the disk) is nothing
- except some images on a computer screen, and some capabilities that weren't
- there before. Sometimes you don't even have that--you have a string of
- error messages instead. But your money is definitely gone. Now we are
- almost accustomed to this, but twenty years ago it was a very dicey
- business proposition. Bill Gates made it work anyway. He didn't make it
- work by selling the best software or offering the cheapest price. Instead
- he somehow got people to believe that they were receiving something in
- exchange for their money.
- The streets of every city in the world are filled with those hulking,
- rattling station wagons. Anyone who doesn't own one feels a little weird,
- and wonders, in spite of himself, whether it might not be time to cease
- resistance and buy one; anyone who does, feels confident that he has
- acquired some meaningful possession, even on those days when the vehicle is
- up on a lift in an auto repair shop.
- All of this is perfectly congruent with membership in the bourgeoisie,
- which is as much a mental, as a material state. And it explains why
- Microsoft is regularly attacked, on the Net, from both sides. People who
- are inclined to feel poor and oppressed construe everything Microsoft does
- as some sinister Orwellian plot. People who like to think of themselves as
- intelligent and informed technology users are driven crazy by the
- clunkiness of Windows.
- Nothing is more annoying to sophisticated people to see someone who is rich
- enough to know better being tacky--unless it is to realize, a moment later,
- that they probably know they are tacky and they simply don't care and they
- are going to go on being tacky, and rich, and happy, forever. Microsoft
- therefore bears the same relationship to the Silicon Valley elite as the
- Beverly Hillbillies did to their fussy banker, Mr. Drysdale--who is
- irritated not so much by the fact that the Clampetts moved to his
- neighborhood as by the knowledge that, when Jethro is seventy years old,
- he's still going to be talking like a hillbilly and wearing bib overalls,
- and he's still going to be a lot richer than Mr. Drysdale.
- Even the hardware that Windows ran on, when compared to the machines put
- out by Apple, looked like white-trash stuff, and still mostly does. The
- reason was that Apple was and is a hardware company, while Microsoft was
- and is a software company. Apple therefore had a monopoly on hardware that
- could run MacOS, whereas Windows-compatible hardware came out of a free
- market. The free market seems to have decided that people will not pay for
- cool-looking computers; PC hardware makers who hire designers to make their
- stuff look distinctive get their clocks cleaned by Taiwanese clone makers
- punching out boxes that look as if they belong on cinderblocks in front of
- someone's trailer. But Apple could make their hardware as pretty as they
- wanted to and simply pass the higher prices on to their besotted consumers,
- like me. Only last week (I am writing this sentence in early Jan. 1999) the
- technology sections of all the newspapers were filled with adulatory press
- coverage of how Apple had released the iMac in several happenin' new colors
- like Blueberry and Tangerine.
- Apple has always insisted on having a hardware monopoly, except for a brief
- period in the mid-1990s when they allowed clone-makers to compete with
- them, before subsequently putting them out of business. Macintosh hardware
- was, consequently, expensive. You didn't open it up and fool around with it
- because doing so would void the warranty. In fact the first Mac was
- specifically designed to be difficult to open--you needed a kit of exotic
- tools, which you could buy through little ads that began to appear in the
- back pages of magazines a few months after the Mac came out on the market.
- These ads always had a certain disreputable air about them, like pitches
- for lock-picking tools in the backs of lurid detective magazines.
- This monopolistic policy can be explained in at least three different ways.
- THE CHARITABLE EXPLANATION is that the hardware monopoly policy reflected a
- drive on Apple's part to provide a seamless, unified blending of hardware,
- operating system, and software. There is something to this. It is hard
- enough to make an OS that works well on one specific piece of hardware,
- designed and tested by engineers who work down the hallway from you, in the
- same company. Making an OS to work on arbitrary pieces of hardware, cranked
- out by rabidly entrepeneurial clonemakers on the other side of the
- International Date Line, is very difficult, and accounts for much of the
- troubles people have using Windows.
- THE FINANCIAL EXPLANATION is that Apple, unlike Microsoft, is and always
- has been a hardware company. It simply depends on revenue from selling
- hardware, and cannot exist without it.
- THE NOT-SO-CHARITABLE EXPLANATION has to do with Apple's corporate culture,
- which is rooted in Bay Area Baby Boomdom.
- Now, since I'm going to talk for a moment about culture, full disclosure is
- probably in order, to protect myself against allegations of conflict of
- interest and ethical turpitude: (1) Geographically I am a Seattleite, of a
- Saturnine temperament, and inclined to take a sour view of the Dionysian
- Bay Area, just as they tend to be annoyed and appalled by us. (2)
- Chronologically I am a post-Baby Boomer. I feel that way, at least, because
- I never experienced the fun and exciting parts of the whole Boomer
- scene--just spent a lot of time dutifully chuckling at Boomers' maddeningly
- pointless anecdotes about just how stoned they got on various occasions,
- and politely fielding their assertions about how great their music was. But
- even from this remove it was possible to glean certain patterns, and one
- that recurred as regularly as an urban legend was the one about how someone
- would move into a commune populated by sandal-wearing, peace-sign flashing
- flower children, and eventually discover that, underneath this facade, the
- guys who ran it were actually control freaks; and that, as living in a
- commune, where much lip service was paid to ideals of peace, love and
- harmony, had deprived them of normal, socially approved outlets for their
- control-freakdom, it tended to come out in other, invariably more sinister,
- ways.
- Applying this to the case of Apple Computer will be left as an exercise for
- the reader, and not a very difficult exercise.
- It is a bit unsettling, at first, to think of Apple as a control freak,
- because it is completely at odds with their corporate image. Weren't these
- the guys who aired the famous Super Bowl ads showing suited, blindfolded
- executives marching like lemmings off a cliff? Isn't this the company that
- even now runs ads picturing the Dalai Lama (except in Hong Kong) and
- Einstein and other offbeat rebels?
- It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they have been able to
- plant this image of themselves as creative and rebellious free-thinkers in
- the minds of so many intelligent and media-hardened skeptics really gives
- one pause. It is testimony to the insidious power of expensive slick ad
- campaigns and, perhaps, to a certain amount of wishful thinking in the
- minds of people who fall for them. It also raises the question of why
- Microsoft is so bad at PR, when the history of Apple demonstrates that, by
- writing large checks to good ad agencies, you can plant a corporate image
- in the minds of intelligent people that is completely at odds with reality.
- (The answer, for people who don't like Damoclean questions, is that since
- Microsoft has won the hearts and minds of the silent majority--the
- bourgeoisie--they don't give a damn about having a slick image, any more
- then Dick Nixon did. "I want to believe,"--the mantra that Fox Mulder has
- pinned to his office wall in The X-Files--applies in different ways to
- these two companies; Mac partisans want to believe in the image of Apple
- purveyed in those ads, and in the notion that Macs are somehow
- fundamentally different from other computers, while Windows people want to
- believe that they are getting something for their money, engaging in a
- respectable business transaction).
- In any event, as of 1987, both MacOS and Windows were out on the market,
- running on hardware platforms that were radically different from each
- other--not only in the sense that MacOS used Motorola CPU chips while
- Windows used Intel, but in the sense--then overlooked, but in the long run,
- vastly more significant--that the Apple hardware business was a rigid
- monopoly and the Windows side was a churning free-for-all.
- But the full ramifications of this did not become clear until very
- recently--in fact, they are still unfolding, in remarkably strange ways, as
- I'll explain when we get to Linux. The upshot is that millions of people
- got accustomed to using GUIs in one form or another. By doing so, they made
- Apple/Microsoft a lot of money. The fortunes of many people have become
- bound up with the ability of these companies to continue selling products
- whose salability is very much open to question.
- HONEY-POT, TAR-PIT, WHATEVER
- When Gates and Allen invented the idea of selling software, they ran into
- criticism from both hackers and sober-sided businesspeople. Hackers
- understood that software was just information, and objected to the idea of
- selling it. These objections were partly moral. The hackers were coming out
- of the scientific and academic world where it is imperative to make the
- results of one's work freely available to the public. They were also partly
- practical; how can you sell something that can be easily copied?
- Businesspeople, who are polar opposites of hackers in so many ways, had
- objections of their own. Accustomed to selling toasters and insurance
- policies, they naturally had a difficult time understanding how a long
- collection of ones and zeroes could constitute a salable product.
- Obviously Microsoft prevailed over these objections, and so did Apple. But
- the objections still exist. The most hackerish of all the hackers, the
- Ur-hacker as it were, was and is Richard Stallman, who became so annoyed
- with the evil practice of selling software that, in 1984 (the same year
- that the Macintosh went on sale) he went off and founded something called
- the Free Software Foundation, which commenced work on something called GNU.
- Gnu is an acronym for Gnu's Not Unix, but this is a joke in more ways than
- one, because GNU most certainly IS Unix,. Because of trademark concerns
- ("Unix" is trademarked by AT&T) they simply could not claim that it was
- Unix, and so, just to be extra safe, they claimed that it wasn't.
- Notwithstanding the incomparable talent and drive possessed by Mr. Stallman
- and other GNU adherents, their project to build a free Unix to compete
- against Microsoft and Apple's OSes was a little bit like trying to dig a
- subway system with a teaspoon. Until, that is, the advent of Linux, which I
- will get to later.
- But the basic idea of re-creating an operating system from scratch was
- perfectly sound and completely doable. It has been done many times. It is
- inherent in the very nature of operating systems.
- Operating systems are not strictly necessary. There is no reason why a
- sufficiently dedicated coder could not start from nothing with every
- project and write fresh code to handle such basic, low-level operations as
- controlling the read/write heads on the disk drives and lighting up pixels
- on the screen. The very first computers had to be programmed in this way.
- But since nearly every program needs to carry out those same basic
- operations, this approach would lead to vast duplication of effort.
- Nothing is more disagreeable to the hacker than duplication of effort. The
- first and most important mental habit that people develop when they learn
- how to write computer programs is to generalize, generalize, generalize. To
- make their code as modular and flexible as possible, breaking large
- problems down into small subroutines that can be used over and over again
- in different contexts. Consequently, the development of operating systems,
- despite being technically unnecessary, was inevitable. Because at its
- heart, an operating system is nothing more than a library containing the
- most commonly used code, written once (and hopefully written well) and then
- made available to every coder who needs it.
- So a proprietary, closed, secret operating system is a contradiction in
- terms. It goes against the whole point of having an operating system. And
- it is impossible to keep them secret anyway. The source code--the original
- lines of text written by the programmers--can be kept secret. But an OS as
- a whole is a collection of small subroutines that do very specific, very
- clearly defined jobs. Exactly what those subroutines do has to be made
- public, quite explicitly and exactly, or else the OS is completely useless
- to programmers; they can't make use of those subroutines if they don't have
- a complete and perfect understanding of what the subroutines do.
- The only thing that isn't made public is exactly how the subroutines do
- what they do. But once you know what a subroutine does, it's generally
- quite easy (if you are a hacker) to write one of your own that does exactly
- the same thing. It might take a while, and it is tedious and unrewarding,
- but in most cases it's not really hard.
- What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing; it's deciding what
- to write. And the vendors of commercial OSes have already decided, and
- published their decisions.
- This has been generally understood for a long time. MS-DOS was duplicated,
- functionally, by a rival product, written from scratch, called ProDOS, that
- did all of the same things in pretty much the same way. In other words,
- another company was able to write code that did all of the same things as
- MS-DOS and sell it at a profit. If you are using the Linux OS, you can get
- a free program called WINE which is a windows emulator; that is, you can
- open up a window on your desktop that runs windows programs. It means that
- a completely functional Windows OS has been recreated inside of Unix, like
- a ship in a bottle. And Unix itself, which is vastly more sophisticated
- than MS-DOS, has been built up from scratch many times over. Versions of it
- are sold by Sun, Hewlett-Packard, AT&T, Silicon Graphics, IBM, and others.
- People have, in other words, been re-writing basic OS code for so long that
- all of the technology that constituted an "operating system" in the
- traditional (pre-GUI) sense of that phrase is now so cheap and common that
- it's literally free. Not only could Gates and Allen not sell MS-DOS today,
- they could not even give it away, because much more powerful OSes are
- already being given away. Even the original Windows (which was the only
- windows until 1995) has become worthless, in that there is no point in
- owning something that can be emulated inside of Linux--which is, itself,
- free.
- In this way the OS business is very different from, say, the car business.
- Even an old rundown car has some value. You can use it for making runs to
- the dump, or strip it for parts. It is the fate of manufactured goods to
- slowly and gently depreciate as they get old and have to compete against
- more modern products.
- But it is the fate of operating systems to become free.
- Microsoft is a great software applications company. Applications--such as
- Microsoft Word--are an area where innovation brings real, direct, tangible
- benefits to users. The innovations might be new technology straight from
- the research department, or they might be in the category of bells and
- whistles, but in any event they are frequently useful and they seem to make
- users happy. And Microsoft is in the process of becoming a great research
- company. But Microsoft is not such a great operating systems company. And
- this is not necessarily because their operating systems are all that bad
- from a purely technological standpoint. Microsoft's OSes do have their
- problems, sure, but they are vastly better than they used to be, and they
- are adequate for most people.
- Why, then, do I say that Microsoft is not such a great operating systems
- company? Because the very nature of operating systems is such that it is
- senseless for them to be developed and owned by a specific company. It's a
- thankless job to begin with. Applications create possibilities for millions
- of credulous users, whereas OSes impose limitations on thousands of grumpy
- coders, and so OS-makers will forever be on the shit-list of anyone who
- counts for anything in the high-tech world. Applications get used by people
- whose big problem is understanding all of their features, whereas OSes get
- hacked by coders who are annoyed by their limitations. The OS business has
- been good to Microsoft only insofar as it has given them the money they
- needed to launch a really good applications software business and to hire a
- lot of smart researchers. Now it really ought to be jettisoned, like a
- spent booster stage from a rocket. The big question is whether Microsoft is
- capable of doing this. Or is it addicted to OS sales in the same way as
- Apple is to selling hardware?
- Keep in mind that Apple's ability to monopolize its own hardware supply was
- once cited, by learned observers, as a great advantage over Microsoft. At
- the time, it seemed to place them in a much stronger position. In the end,
- it nearly killed them, and may kill them yet. The problem, for Apple, was
- that most of the world's computer users ended up owning cheaper hardware.
- But cheap hardware couldn't run MacOS, and so these people switched to
- Windows.
- Replace "hardware" with "operating systems," and "Apple" with "Microsoft"
- and you can see the same thing about to happen all over again. Microsoft
- dominates the OS market, which makes them money and seems like a great idea
- for now. But cheaper and better OSes are available, and they are growingly
- popular in parts of the world that are not so saturated with computers as
- the US. Ten years from now, most of the world's computer users may end up
- owning these cheaper OSes. But these OSes do not, for the time being, run
- any Microsoft applications, and so these people will use something else.
- To put it more directly: every time someone decides to use a non-Microsoft
- OS, Microsoft's OS division, obviously, loses a customer. But, as things
- stand now, Microsoft's applications division loses a customer too. This is
- not such a big deal as long as almost everyone uses Microsoft OSes. But as
- soon as Windows' market share begins to slip, the math starts to look
- pretty dismal for the people in Redmond.
- This argument could be countered by saying that Microsoft could simply
- re-compile its applications to run under other OSes. But this strategy goes
- against most normal corporate instincts. Again the case of Apple is
- instructive. When things started to go south for Apple, they should have
- ported their OS to cheap PC hardware. But they didn't. Instead, they tried
- to make the most of their brilliant hardware, adding new features and
- expanding the product line. But this only had the effect of making their OS
- more dependent on these special hardware features, which made it worse for
- them in the end.
- Likewise, when Microsoft's position in the OS world is threatened, their
- corporate instincts will tell them to pile more new features into their
- operating systems, and then re-jigger their software applications to
- exploit those special features. But this will only have the effect of
- making their applications dependent on an OS with declining market share,
- and make it worse for them in the end.
- The operating system market is a death-trap, a tar-pit, a slough of
- despond. There are only two reasons to invest in Apple and Microsoft. (1)
- each of these companies is in what we would call a co-dependency
- relationship with their customers. The customers Want To Believe, and Apple
- and Microsoft know how to give them what they want. (2) each company works
- very hard to add new features to their OSes, which works to secure customer
- loyalty, at least for a little while.
- Accordingly, most of the remainder of this essay will be about those two
- topics.
- THE TECHNOSPHERE
- Unix is the only OS remaining whose GUI (a vast suite of code called the X
- Windows System) is separate from the OS in the old sense of the phrase.
- This is to say that you can run Unix in pure command-line mode if you want
- to, with no windows, icons, mouses, etc. whatsoever, and it will still be
- Unix and capable of doing everything Unix is supposed to do. But the other
- OSes: MacOS, the Windows family, and BeOS, have their GUIs tangled up with
- the old-fashioned OS functions to the extent that they have to run in GUI
- mode, or else they are not really running. So it's no longer really
- possible to think of GUIs as being distinct from the OS; they're now an
- inextricable part of the OSes that they belong to--and they are by far the
- largest part, and by far the most expensive and difficult part to create.
- There are only two ways to sell a product: price and features. When OSes
- are free, OS companies cannot compete on price, and so they compete on
- features. This means that they are always trying to outdo each other
- writing code that, until recently, was not considered to be part of an OS
- at all: stuff like GUIs. This explains a lot about how these companies
- behave.
- It explains why Microsoft added a browser to their OS, for example. It is
- easy to get free browsers, just as to get free OSes. If browsers are free,
- and OSes are free, it would seem that there is no way to make money from
- browsers or OSes. But if you can integrate a browser into the OS and
- thereby imbue both of them with new features, you have a salable product.
- Setting aside, for the moment, the fact that this makes government
- anti-trust lawyers really mad, this strategy makes sense. At least, it
- makes sense if you assume (as Microsoft's management appears to) that the
- OS has to be protected at all costs. The real question is whether every new
- technological trend that comes down the pike ought to be used as a crutch
- to maintain the OS's dominant position. Confronted with the Web phenomenon,
- Microsoft had to develop a really good web browser, and they did. But then
- they had a choice: they could have made that browser work on many different
- OSes, which would give Microsoft a strong position in the Internet world no
- matter what happened to their OS market share. Or they could make the
- browser one with the OS, gambling that this would make the OS look so
- modern and sexy that it would help to preserve their dominance in that
- market. The problem is that when Microsoft's OS position begins to erode
- (and since it is currently at something like ninety percent, it can't go
- anywhere but down) it will drag everything else down with it.
- In your high school geology class you probably were taught that all life on
- earth exists in a paper-thin shell called the biosphere, which is trapped
- between thousands of miles of dead rock underfoot, and cold dead
- radioactive empty space above. Companies that sell OSes exist in a sort of
- technosphere. Underneath is technology that has already become free. Above
- is technology that has yet to be developed, or that is too crazy and
- speculative to be productized just yet. Like the Earth's biosphere, the
- technosphere is very thin compared to what is above and what is below.
- But it moves a lot faster. In various parts of our world, it is possible to
- go and visit rich fossil beds where skeleton lies piled upon skeleton,
- recent ones on top and more ancient ones below. In theory they go all the
- way back to the first single-celled organisms. And if you use your
- imagination a bit, you can understand that, if you hang around long enough,
- you'll become fossilized there too, and in time some more advanced organism
- will become fossilized on top of you.
- The fossil record--the La Brea Tar Pit--of software technology is the
- Internet. Anything that shows up there is free for the taking (possibly
- illegal, but free). Executives at companies like Microsoft must get used to
- the experience--unthinkable in other industries--of throwing millions of
- dollars into the development of new technologies, such as Web browsers, and
- then seeing the same or equivalent software show up on the Internet two
- years, or a year, or even just a few months, later.
- By continuing to develop new technologies and add features onto their
- products they can keep one step ahead of the fossilization process, but on
- certain days they must feel like mammoths caught at La Brea, using all
- their energies to pull their feet, over and over again, out of the sucking
- hot tar that wants to cover and envelop them.
- Survival in this biosphere demands sharp tusks and heavy, stomping feet at
- one end of the organization, and Microsoft famously has those. But
- trampling the other mammoths into the tar can only keep you alive for so
- long. The danger is that in their obsession with staying out of the fossil
- beds, these companies will forget about what lies above the biosphere: the
- realm of new technology. In other words, they must hang onto their
- primitive weapons and crude competitive instincts, but also evolve powerful
- brains. This appears to be what Microsoft is doing with its research
- division, which has been hiring smart people right and left (Here I should
- mention that although I know, and socialize with, several people in that
- company's research division, we never talk about business issues and I have
- little to no idea what the hell they are up to. I have learned much more
- about Microsoft by using the Linux operating system than I ever would have
- done by using Windows).
- Never mind how Microsoft used to make money; today, it is making its money
- on a kind of temporal arbitrage. "Arbitrage," in the usual sense, means to
- make money by taking advantage of differences in the price of something
- between different markets. It is spatial, in other words, and hinges on the
- arbitrageur knowing what is going on simultaneously in different places.
- Microsoft is making money by taking advantage of differences in the price
- of technology in different times. Temporal arbitrage, if I may coin a
- phrase, hinges on the arbitrageur knowing what technologies people will pay
- money for next year, and how soon afterwards those same technologies will
- become free. What spatial and temporal arbitrage have in common is that
- both hinge on the arbitrageur's being extremely well-informed; one about
- price gradients across space at a given time, and the other about price
- gradients over time in a given place.
- So Apple/Microsoft shower new features upon their users almost daily, in
- the hopes that a steady stream of genuine technical innovations, combined
- with the "I want to believe" phenomenon, will prevent their customers from
- looking across the road towards the cheaper and better OSes that are
- available to them. The question is whether this makes sense in the long
- run. If Microsoft is addicted to OSes as Apple is to hardware, then they
- will bet the whole farm on their OSes, and tie all of their new
- applications and technologies to them. Their continued survival will then
- depend on these two things: adding more features to their OSes so that
- customers will not switch to the cheaper alternatives, and maintaining the
- image that, in some mysterious way, gives those customers the feeling that
- they are getting something for their money.
- The latter is a truly strange and interesting cultural phenomenon.
- THE INTERFACE CULTURE
- A few years ago I walked into a grocery store somewhere and was presented
- with the following tableau vivant: near the entrance a young couple were
- standing in front of a large cosmetics display. The man was stolidly
- holding a shopping basket between his hands while his mate raked
- blister-packs of makeup off the display and piled them in. Since then I've
- always thought of that man as the personification of an interesting human
- tendency: not only are we not offended to be dazzled by manufactured
- images, but we like it. We practically insist on it. We are eager to be
- complicit in our own dazzlement: to pay money for a theme park ride, vote
- for a guy who's obviously lying to us, or stand there holding the basket as
- it's filled up with cosmetics.
- I was in Disney World recently, specifically the part of it called the
- Magic Kingdom, walking up Main Street USA. This is a perfect gingerbready
- Victorian small town that culminates in a Disney castle. It was very
- crowded; we shuffled rather than walked. Directly in front of me was a man
- with a camcorder. It was one of the new breed of camcorders where instead
- of peering through a viewfinder you gaze at a flat-panel color screen about
- the size of a playing card, which televises live coverage of whatever the
- camcorder is seeing. He was holding the appliance close to his face, so
- that it obstructed his view. Rather than go see a real small town for free,
- he had paid money to see a pretend one, and rather than see it with the
- naked eye he was watching it on television.
- And rather than stay home and read a book, I was watching him.
- Americans' preference for mediated experiences is obvious enough, and I'm
- not going to keep pounding it into the ground. I'm not even going to make
- snotty comments about it--after all, I was at Disney World as a paying
- customer. But it clearly relates to the colossal success of GUIs and so I
- have to talk about it some. Disney does mediated experiences better than
- anyone. If they understood what OSes are, and why people use them, they
- could crush Microsoft in a year or two.
- In the part of Disney World called the Animal Kingdom there is a new
- attraction, slated to open in March 1999, called the Maharajah Jungle Trek.
- It was open for sneak previews when I was there. This is a complete
- stone-by-stone reproduction of a hypothetical ruin in the jungles of India.
- According to its backstory, it was built by a local rajah in the 16th
- Century as a game reserve. He would go there with his princely guests to
- hunt Bengal tigers. As time went on it fell into disrepair and the tigers
- and monkeys took it over; eventually, around the time of India's
- independence, it became a government wildlife reserve, now open to
- visitors.
- The place looks more like what I have just described than any actual
- building you might find in India. All the stones in the broken walls are
- weathered as if monsoon rains had been trickling down them for centuries,
- the paint on the gorgeous murals is flaked and faded just so, and Bengal
- tigers loll amid stumps of broken columns. Where modern repairs have been
- made to the ancient structure, they've been done, not as Disney's engineers
- would do them, but as thrifty Indian janitors would--with hunks of bamboo
- and rust-spotted hunks of rebar. The rust is painted on, or course, and
- protected from real rust by a plastic clear-coat, but you can't tell unless
- you get down on your knees.
- In one place you walk along a stone wall with a series of old pitted
- friezes carved into it. One end of the wall has broken off and settled into
- the earth, perhaps because of some long-forgotten earthquake, and so a
- broad jagged crack runs across a panel or two, but the story is still
- readable: first, primordial chaos leads to a flourishing of many animal
- species. Next, we see the Tree of Life surrounded by diverse animals. This
- is an obvious allusion (or, in showbiz lingo, a tie-in) to the gigantic
- Tree of Life that dominates the center of Disney's Animal Kingdom just as
- the Castle dominates the Magic Kingdom or the Sphere does Epcot. But it's
- rendered in historically correct style and could probably fool anyone who
- didn't have a Ph.D. in Indian art history.
- The next panel shows a mustachioed H. sapiens chopping down the Tree of
- Life with a scimitar, and the animals fleeing every which way. The one
- after that shows the misguided human getting walloped by a tidal wave, part
- of a latter-day Deluge presumably brought on by his stupidity.
- The final panel, then, portrays the Sapling of Life beginning to grow back,
- but now Man has ditched the edged weapon and joined the other animals in
- standing around to adore and praise it.
- It is, in other words, a prophecy of the Bottleneck: the scenario, commonly
- espoused among modern-day environmentalists, that the world faces an
- upcoming period of grave ecological tribulations that will last for a few
- decades or centuries and end when we find a new harmonious modus vivendi
- with Nature.
- Taken as a whole the frieze is a pretty brilliant piece of work. Obviously
- it's not an ancient Indian ruin, and some person or people now living
- deserve credit for it. But there are no signatures on the Maharajah's game
- reserve at Disney World. There are no signatures on anything, because it
- would ruin the whole effect to have long strings of production credits
- dangling from every custom-worn brick, as they do from Hollywood movies.
- Among Hollywood writers, Disney has the reputation of being a real wicked
- stepmother. It's not hard to see why. Disney is in the business of putting
- out a product of seamless illusion--a magic mirror that reflects the world
- back better than it really is. But a writer is literally talking to his or
- her readers, not just creating an ambience or presenting them with
- something to look at; and just as the command-line interface opens a much
- more direct and explicit channel from user to machine than the GUI, so it
- is with words, writer, and reader.
- The word, in the end, is the only system of encoding thoughts--the only
- medium--that is not fungible, that refuses to dissolve in the devouring
- torrent of electronic media (the richer tourists at Disney World wear
- t-shirts printed with the names of famous designers, because designs
- themselves can be bootlegged easily and with impunity. The only way to make
- clothing that cannot be legally bootlegged is to print copyrighted and
- trademarked words on it; once you have taken that step, the clothing itself
- doesn't really matter, and so a t-shirt is as good as anything else.
- T-shirts with expensive words on them are now the insignia of the upper
- class. T-shirts with cheap words, or no words at all, are for the
- commoners).
- But this special quality of words and of written communication would have
- the same effect on Disney's product as spray-painted graffiti on a magic
- mirror. So Disney does most of its communication without resorting to
- words, and for the most part, the words aren't missed. Some of Disney's
- older properties, such as Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, and Alice in
- Wonderland, came out of books. But the authors' names are rarely if ever
- mentioned, and you can't buy the original books at the Disney store. If you
- could, they would all seem old and queer, like very bad knockoffs of the
- purer, more authentic Disney versions. Compared to more recent productions
- like Beauty and the Beast and Mulan, the Disney movies based on these books
- (particularly Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan) seem deeply bizarre, and
- not wholly appropriate for children. That stands to reason, because Lewis
- Carroll and J.M. Barrie were very strange men, and such is the nature of
- the written word that their personal strangeness shines straight through
- all the layers of Disneyfication like x-rays through a wall. Probably for
- this very reason, Disney seems to have stopped buying books altogether, and
- now finds its themes and characters in folk tales, which have the lapidary,
- time-worn quality of the ancient bricks in the Maharajah's ruins.
- If I can risk a broad generalization, most of the people who go to Disney
- World have zero interest in absorbing new ideas from books. Which sounds
- snide, but listen: they have no qualms about being presented with ideas in
- other forms. Disney World is stuffed with environmental messages now, and
- the guides at Animal Kingdom can talk your ear off about biology.
- If you followed those tourists home, you might find art, but it would be
- the sort of unsigned folk art that's for sale in Disney World's African-
- and Asian-themed stores. In general they only seem comfortable with media
- that have been ratified by great age, massive popular acceptance, or both.
- In this world, artists are like the anonymous, illiterate stone carvers who
- built the great cathedrals of Europe and then faded away into unmarked
- graves in the churchyard. The cathedral as a whole is awesome and stirring
- in spite, and possibly because, of the fact that we have no idea who built
- it. When we walk through it we are communing not with individual stone
- carvers but with an entire culture.
- Disney World works the same way. If you are an intellectual type, a reader
- or writer of books, the nicest thing you can say about this is that the
- execution is superb. But it's easy to find the whole environment a little
- creepy, because something is missing: the translation of all its content
- into clear explicit written words, the attribution of the ideas to specific
- people. You can't argue with it. It seems as if a hell of a lot might be
- being glossed over, as if Disney World might be putting one over on us, and
- possibly getting away with all kinds of buried assumptions and muddled
- thinking.
- But this is precisely the same as what is lost in the transition from the
- command-line interface to the GUI.
- Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting
- laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed
- interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself--and more than
- just graphical. Let's call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to
- anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.
- Why are we rejecting explicit word-based interfaces, and embracing
- graphical or sensorial ones--a trend that accounts for the success of both
- Microsoft and Disney?
- Part of it is simply that the world is very complicated now--much more
- complicated than the hunter-gatherer world that our brains evolved to cope
- with--and we simply can't handle all of the details. We have to delegate.
- We have no choice but to trust some nameless artist at Disney or programmer
- at Apple or Microsoft to make a few choices for us, close off some options,
- and give us a conveniently packaged executive summary.
- But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century,
- intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and
- Germany, the common people 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 abbatoir.
- Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of
- dangerous as well.
- We Americans are the only ones who didn't get creamed at some point during
- all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political
- and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century
- intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with
- those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the
- point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much
- more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations
- nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this
- actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining
- that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to
- them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them
- that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they
- become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages,
- may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than
- the Declaration of Independence.
- A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values
- through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of
- running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is
- why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like
- the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Unless the
- messages conveyed by our media are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set
- of precepts, they can wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of
- crap into people's minds.
- Orlando used to have a military installation called McCoy Air Force Base,
- with long runways from which B-52s could take off and reach Cuba, or just
- about anywhere else, with loads of nukes. But now McCoy has been scrapped
- and repurposed. It has been absorbed into Orlando's civilian airport. The
- long runways are being used to land 747-loads of tourists from Brazil,
- Italy, Russia and Japan, so that they can come to Disney World and steep in
- our media for a while.
- To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is
- infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. It is obvious, to
- everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords,
- multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in
- many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural
- differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or "honoring diversity"
- or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each
- other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is
- right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and
- another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of
- qualities.
- The lesson most people are taking home from the Twentieth Century is that,
- in order for a large number of different cultures to coexist peacefully on
- the globe (or even in a neighborhood) it is necessary for people to suspend
- judgment in this way. Hence (I would argue) our suspicion of, and hostility
- towards, all authority figures in modern culture. As David Foster Wallace
- has explained in his essay "E Unibus Pluram," this is the fundamental
- message of television; it is the message that people take home, anyway,
- after they have steeped in our media long enough. It's not expressed in
- these highfalutin terms, of course. It comes through as the presumption
- that all authority figures--teachers, generals, cops, ministers,
- politicians--are hypocritical buffoons, and that hip jaded coolness is the
- only way to be.
- The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make
- judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there's no real
- culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. The ability to
- make judgments, to believe things, is the entire it point of having a
- culture. I think this is why guys with machine guns sometimes pop up in
- places like Luxor, and begin pumping bullets into Westerners. They
- perfectly understand the lesson of McCoy Air Force Base. When their sons
- come home wearing Chicago Bulls caps with the bills turned sideways, the
- dads go out of their minds.
- The global anti-culture that has been conveyed into every cranny of the
- world by television is a culture unto itself, and by the standards of great
- and ancient cultures like Islam and France, it seems grossly inferior, at
- least at first. The only good thing you can say about it is that it makes
- world wars and Holocausts less likely--and that is actually a pretty good
- thing!
- The only real problem is that anyone who has no culture, other than this
- global monoculture, is completely screwed. Anyone who grows up watching TV,
- never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral
- relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV
- news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other
- in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come
- out into the world as one pretty feckless human being. And--again--perhaps
- the goal of all this is to make us feckless so we won't nuke each other.
- On the other hand, if you are raised within some specific culture, you end
- up with a basic set of tools that you can use to think about and understand
- the world. You might use those tools to reject the culture you were raised
- in, but at least you've got some tools.
- In this country, the people who run things--who populate major law firms
- and corporate boards--understand all of this at some level. They pay lip
- service to multiculturalism and diversity and non-judgmentalness, but they
- don't raise their own children that way. I have highly educated,
- technically sophisticated friends who have moved to small towns in Iowa to
- live and raise their children, and there are Hasidic Jewish enclaves in New
- York where large numbers of kids are being brought up according to
- traditional beliefs. Any suburban community might be thought of as a place
- where people who hold certain (mostly implicit) beliefs go to live among
- others who think the same way.
- And not only do these people feel some responsibility to their own
- children, but to the country as a whole. Some of the upper class are vile
- and cynical, of course, but many spend at least part of their time fretting
- about what direction the country is going in, and what responsibilities
- they have. And so issues that are important to book-reading intellectuals,
- such as global environmental collapse, eventually percolate through the
- porous buffer of mass culture and show up as ancient Hindu ruins in
- Orlando.
- You may be asking: what the hell does all this have to do with operating
- systems? As I've explained, there is no way to explain the domination of
- the OS market by Apple/Microsoft without looking to cultural explanations,
- and so I can't get anywhere, in this essay, without first letting you know
- where I'm coming from vis-a-vis contemporary culture.
- Contemporary culture is a two-tiered system, like the Morlocks and the Eloi
- in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, except that it's been turned upside down.
- In The Time Machine the Eloi were an effete upper class, supported by lots
- of subterranean Morlocks who kept the technological wheels turning. But in
- our world it's the other way round. The Morlocks are in the minority, and
- they are running the show, because they understand how everything works.
- The much more numerous Eloi learn everything they know from being steeped
- from birth in electronic media directed and controlled by book-reading
- Morlocks. So many ignorant people could be dangerous if they got pointed in
- the wrong direction, and so we've evolved a popular culture that is (a)
- almost unbelievably infectious and (b) neuters every person who gets
- infected by it, by rendering them unwilling to make judgments and incapable
- of taking stands.
- Morlocks, who have the energy and intelligence to comprehend details, go
- out and master complex subjects and produce Disney-like Sensorial
- Interfaces so that Eloi can get the gist without having to strain their
- minds or endure boredom. Those Morlocks will go to India and tediously
- explore a hundred ruins, then come home and built sanitary bug-free
- versions: highlight films, as it were. This costs a lot, because Morlocks
- insist on good coffee and first-class airline tickets, but that's no
- problem because Eloi like to be dazzled and will gladly pay for it all.
- Now I realize that most of this probably sounds snide and bitter to the
- point of absurdity: your basic snotty intellectual throwing a tantrum about
- those unlettered philistines. As if I were a self-styled Moses, coming down
- from the mountain all alone, carrying the stone tablets bearing the Ten
- Commandments carved in immutable stone--the original command-line
- interface--and blowing his stack at the weak, unenlightened Hebrews
- worshipping images. Not only that, but it sounds like I'm pumping some sort
- of conspiracy theory.
- But that is not where I'm going with this. The situation I describe, here,
- could be bad, but doesn't have to be bad and isn't necessarily bad now:
- * It simply is the case that we are way too busy, nowadays, to
- comprehend everything in detail. And it's better to comprehend it
- dimly, through an interface, than not at all. Better for ten million
- Eloi to go on the Kilimanjaro Safari at Disney World than for a
- thousand cardiovascular surgeons and mutual fund managers to go on
- "real" ones in Kenya.
- * The boundary between these two classes is more porous than I've made
- it sound. I'm always running into regular dudes--construction workers,
- auto mechanics, taxi drivers, galoots in general--who were largely
- aliterate until something made it necessary for them to become readers
- and start actually thinking about things. Perhaps they had to come to
- grips with alcoholism, perhaps they got sent to jail, or came down
- with a disease, or suffered a crisis in religious faith, or simply got
- bored. Such people can get up to speed on particular subjects quite
- rapidly. Sometimes their lack of a broad education makes them over-apt
- to go off on intellectual wild goose chases, but, hey, at least a wild
- goose chase gives you some exercise.
- * The spectre of a polity controlled by the fads and whims of voters who
- actually believe that there are significant differences between Bud
- Lite and Miller Lite, and who think that professional wrestling is for
- real, is naturally alarming to people who don't. But then countries
- controlled via the command-line interface, as it were, by double-domed
- intellectuals, be they religious or secular, are generally miserable
- places to live.
- * Sophisticated people deride Disneyesque entertainments as pat and
- saccharine, but, hey, if the result of that is to instill basically
- warm and sympathetic reflexes, at a preverbal level, into hundreds of
- millions of unlettered media-steepers, then how bad can it be? We
- killed a lobster in our kitchen last night and my daughter cried for
- an hour. The Japanese, who used to be just about the fiercest people
- on earth, have become infatuated with cuddly adorable cartoon
- characters.
- * My own family--the people I know best--is divided about evenly between
- people who will probably read this essay and people who almost
- certainly won't, and I can't say for sure that one group is
- necessarily warmer, happier, or better-adjusted than the other.
- MORLOCKS AND ELOI AT THE KEYBOARD
- Back in the days of the command-line interface, users were all Morlocks who
- had to convert their thoughts into alphanumeric symbols and type them in, a
- grindingly tedious process that stripped away all ambiguity, laid bare all
- hidden assumptions, and cruelly punished laziness and imprecision. Then the
- interface-makers went to work on their GUIs, and introduced a new semiotic
- layer between people and machines. People who use such systems have
- abdicated the responsibility, and surrendered the power, of sending bits
- directly to the chip that's doing the arithmetic, and handed that
- responsibility and power over to the OS. This is tempting because giving
- clear instructions, to anyone or anything, is difficult. We cannot do it
- without thinking, and depending on the complexity of the situation, we may
- have to think hard about abstract things, and consider any number of
- ramifications, in order to do a good job of it. For most of us, this is
- hard work. We want things to be easier. How badly we want it can be
- measured by the size of Bill Gates's fortune.
- The OS has (therefore) become a sort of intellectual labor-saving device
- that tries to translate humans' vaguely expressed intentions into bits. In
- effect we are asking our computers to shoulder responsibilities that have
- always been considered the province of human beings--we want them to
- understand our desires, to anticipate our needs, to foresee consequences,
- to make connections, to handle routine chores without being asked, to
- remind us of what we ought to be reminded of while filtering out noise.
- At the upper (which is to say, closer to the user) levels, this is done
- through a set of conventions--menus, buttons, and so on. These work in the
- sense that analogies work: they help Eloi understand abstract or unfamiliar
- concepts by likening them to something known. But the loftier word
- "metaphor" is used.
- The overarching concept of the MacOS was the "desktop metaphor" and it
- subsumed any number of lesser (and frequently conflicting, or at least
- mixed) metaphors. Under a GUI, a file (frequently called "document") is
- metaphrased as a window on the screen (which is called a "desktop"). The
- window is almost always too small to contain the document and so you "move
- around," or, more pretentiously, "navigate" in the document by "clicking
- and dragging" the "thumb" on the "scroll bar." When you "type" (using a
- keyboard) or "draw" (using a "mouse") into the "window" or use pull-down
- "menus" and "dialog boxes" to manipulate its contents, the results of your
- labors get stored (at least in theory) in a "file," and later you can pull
- the same information back up into another "window." When you don't want it
- anymore, you "drag" it into the "trash."
- There is massively promiscuous metaphor-mixing going on here, and I could
- deconstruct it 'til the cows come home, but I won't. Consider only one
- word: "document." When we document something in the real world, we make
- fixed, permanent, immutable records of it. But computer documents are
- volatile, ephemeral constellations of data. Sometimes (as when you've just
- opened or saved them) the document as portrayed in the window is identical
- to what is stored, under the same name, in a file on the disk, but other
- times (as when you have made changes without saving them) it is completely
- different. In any case, every time you hit "Save" you annihilate the
- previous version of the "document" and replace it with whatever happens to
- be in the window at the moment. So even the word "save" is being used in a
- sense that is grotesquely misleading---"destroy one version, save another"
- would be more accurate.
- Anyone who uses a word processor for very long inevitably has the
- experience of putting hours of work into a long document and then losing it
- because the computer crashes or the power goes out. Until the moment that
- it disappears from the screen, the document seems every bit as solid and
- real as if it had been typed out in ink on paper. But in the next moment,
- without warning, it is completely and irretrievably gone, as if it had
- never existed. The user is left with a feeling of disorientation (to say
- nothing of annoyance) stemming from a kind of metaphor shear--you realize
- that you've been living and thinking inside of a metaphor that is
- essentially bogus.
- So GUIs use metaphors to make computing easier, but they are bad metaphors.
- Learning to use them is essentially a word game, a process of learning new
- definitions of words like "window" and "document" and "save" that are
- different from, and in many cases almost diametrically opposed to, the old.
- Somewhat improbably, this has worked very well, at least from a commercial
- standpoint, which is to say that Apple/Microsoft have made a lot of money
- off of it. All of the other modern operating systems have learned that in
- order to be accepted by users they must conceal their underlying gutwork
- beneath the same sort of spackle. This has some advantages: if you know how
- to use one GUI operating system, you can probably work out how to use any
- other in a few minutes. Everything works a little differently, like
- European plumbing--but with some fiddling around, you can type a memo or
- surf the web.
- Most people who shop for OSes (if they bother to shop at all) are comparing
- not the underlying functions but the superficial look and feel. The average
- buyer of an OS is not really paying for, and is not especially interested
- in, the low-level code that allocates memory or writes bytes onto the disk.
- What we're really buying is a system of metaphors. And--much more
- important--what we're buying into is the underlying assumption that
- metaphors are a good way to deal with the world.
- Recently a lot of new hardware has become available that gives computers
- numerous interesting ways of affecting the real world: making paper spew
- out of printers, causing words to appear on screens thousands of miles
- away, shooting beams of radiation through cancer patients, creating
- realistic moving pictures of the Titanic. Windows is now used as an OS for
- cash registers and bank tellers' terminals. My satellite TV system uses a
- sort of GUI to change channels and show program guides. Modern cellular
- telephones have a crude GUI built into a tiny LCD screen. Even Legos now
- have a GUI: you can buy a Lego set called Mindstorms that enables you to
- build little Lego robots and program them through a GUI on your computer.
- So we are now asking the GUI to do a lot more than serve as a glorified
- typewriter. Now we want to become a generalized tool for dealing with
- reality. This has become a bonanza for companies that make a living out of
- bringing new technology to the mass market.
- Obviously you cannot sell a complicated technological system to people
- without some sort of interface that enables them to use it. The internal
- combustion engine was a technological marvel in its day, but useless as a
- consumer good until a clutch, transmission, steering wheel and throttle
- were connected to it. That odd collection of gizmos, which survives to this
- day in every car on the road, made up what we would today call a user
- interface. But if cars had been invented after Macintoshes, carmakers would
- not have bothered to gin up all of these arcane devices. We would have a
- computer screen instead of a dashboard, and a mouse (or at best a joystick)
- instead of a steering wheel, and we'd shift gears by pulling down a menu:
- PARK
- ---
- REVERSE
- ---
- NEUTRAL
- ----
- 3
- 2
- 1
- ---
- Help...
- A few lines of computer code can thus be made to substitute for any
- imaginable mechanical interface. The problem is that in many cases the
- substitute is a poor one. Driving a car through a GUI would be a miserable
- experience. Even if the GUI were perfectly bug-free, it would be incredibly
- dangerous, because menus and buttons simply can't be as responsive as
- direct mechanical controls. My friend's dad, the gentleman who was
- restoring the MGB, never would have bothered with it if it had been
- equipped with a GUI. It wouldn't have been any fun.
- The steering wheel and gearshift lever were invented during an era when the
- most complicated technology in most homes was a butter churn. Those early
- carmakers were simply lucky, in that they could dream up whatever interface
- was best suited to the task of driving an automobile, and people would
- learn it. Likewise with the dial telephone and the AM radio. By the time of
- the Second World War, most people knew several interfaces: they could not
- only churn butter but also drive a car, dial a telephone, turn on a radio,
- summon flame from a cigarette lighter, and change a light bulb.
- But now every little thing--wristwatches, VCRs, stoves--is jammed with
- features, and every feature is useless without an interface. If you are
- like me, and like most other consumers, you have never used ninety percent
- of the available features on your microwave oven, VCR, or cellphone. You
- don't even know that these features exist. The small benefit they might
- bring you is outweighed by the sheer hassle of having to learn about them.
- This has got to be a big problem for makers of consumer goods, because they
- can't compete without offering features.
- It's no longer acceptable for engineers to invent a wholly novel user
- interface for every new product, as they did in the case of the automobile,
- partly because it's too expensive and partly because ordinary people can
- only learn so much. If the VCR had been invented a hundred years ago, it
- would have come with a thumbwheel to adjust the tracking and a gearshift to
- change between forward and reverse and a big cast-iron handle to load or to
- eject the cassettes. It would have had a big analog clock on the front of
- it, and you would have set the time by moving the hands around on the dial.
- But because the VCR was invented when it was--during a sort of awkward
- transitional period between the era of mechanical interfaces and GUIs--it
- just had a bunch of pushbuttons on the front, and in order to set the time
- you had to push the buttons in just the right way. This must have seemed
- reasonable enough to the engineers responsible for it, but to many users it
- was simply impossible. Thus the famous blinking 12:00 that appears on so
- many VCRs. Computer people call this "the blinking twelve problem". When
- they talk about it, though, they usually aren't talking about VCRs.
- Modern VCRs usually have some kind of on-screen programming, which means
- that you can set the time and control other features through a sort of
- primitive GUI. GUIs have virtual pushbuttons too, of course, but they also
- have other types of virtual controls, like radio buttons, checkboxes, text
- entry boxes, dials, and scrollbars. Interfaces made out of these components
- seem to be a lot easier, for many people, than pushing those little buttons
- on the front of the machine, and so the blinking 12:00 itself is slowly
- disappearing from America's living rooms. The blinking twelve problem has
- moved on to plague other technologies.
- So the GUI has gone beyond being an interface to personal computers, and
- become a sort of meta-interface that is pressed into service for every new
- piece of consumer technology. It is rarely an ideal fit, but having an
- ideal, or even a good interface is no longer the priority; the important
- thing now is having some kind of interface that customers will actually
- use, so that manufacturers can claim, with a straight face, that they are
- offering new features.
- We want GUIs largely because they are convenient and because they are
- easy-- or at least the GUI makes it seem that way Of course, nothing is
- really easy and simple, and putting a nice interface on top of it does not
- change that fact. A car controlled through a GUI would be easier to drive
- than one controlled through pedals and steering wheel, but it would be
- incredibly dangerous.
- By using GUIs all the time we have insensibly bought into a premise that
- few people would have accepted if it were presented to them bluntly:
- namely, that hard things can be made easy, and complicated things simple,
- by putting the right interface on them. In order to understand how bizarre
- this is, imagine that book reviews were written according to the same
- values system that we apply to user interfaces: "The writing in this book
- is marvelously simple-minded and glib; the author glosses over complicated
- subjects and employs facile generalizations in almost every sentence.
- Readers rarely have to think, and are spared all of the difficulty and
- tedium typically involved in reading old-fashioned books." As long as we
- stick to simple operations like setting the clocks on our VCRs, this is not
- so bad. But as we try to do more ambitious things with our technologies, we
- inevitably run into the problem of:
- METAPHOR SHEAR
- I began using Microsoft Word as soon as the first version was released
- around 1985. After some initial hassles I found it to be a better tool than
- MacWrite, which was its only competition at the time. I wrote a lot of
- stuff in early versions of Word, storing it all on floppies, and
- transferred the contents of all my floppies to my first hard drive, which I
- acquired around 1987. As new versions of Word came out I faithfully
- upgraded, reasoning that as a writer it made sense for me to spend a
- certain amount of money on tools.
- Sometime in the mid-1980's I attempted to open one of my old, circa-1985
- Word documents using the version of Word then current: 6.0 It didn't work.
- Word 6.0 did not recognize a document created by an earlier version of
- itself. By opening it as a text file, I was able to recover the sequences
- of letters that made up the text of the document. My words were still
- there. But the formatting had been run through a log chipper--the words I'd
- written were interrupted by spates of empty rectangular boxes and
- gibberish.
- Now, in the context of a business (the chief market for Word) this sort of
- thing is only an annoyance--one of the routine hassles that go along with
- using computers. It's easy to buy little file converter programs that will
- take care of this problem. But if you are a writer whose career is words,
- whose professional identity is a corpus of written documents, this kind of
- thing is extremely disquieting. There are very few fixed assumptions in my
- line of work, but one of them is that once you have written a word, it is
- written, and cannot be unwritten. The ink stains the paper, the chisel cuts
- the stone, the stylus marks the clay, and something has irrevocably
- happened (my brother-in-law is a theologian who reads 3250-year-old
- cuneiform tablets--he can recognize the handwriting of particular scribes,
- and identify them by name). But word-processing software--particularly the
- sort that employs special, complex file formats--has the eldritch power to
- unwrite things. A small change in file formats, or a few twiddled bits, and
- months' or years' literary output can cease to exist.
- 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.
- It was--if you'll pardon me for a moment's strange little fantasy--as if
- I'd gone to stay at some resort, some exquisitely designed and art-directed
- hotel, placing myself in the hands of past masters of the Sensorial
- Interface, and had sat down in my room and written a story in ballpoint pen
- on a yellow legal pad, and when I returned from dinner, discovered that the
- maid had taken my work away and left behind in its place a quill pen and a
- stack of fine parchment--explaining that the room looked ever so much finer
- this way, and it was all part of a routine upgrade. But written on these
- sheets of paper, in flawless penmanship, were long sequences of words
- chosen at random from the dictionary. Appalling, sure, but I couldn't
- really lodge a complaint with the management, because by staying at this
- resort I had given my consent to it. I had surrendered my Morlock
- credentials and become an Eloi.
- LINUX
- During the late 1980's and early 1990's I spent a lot of time programming
- Macintoshes, and eventually decided for fork over several hundred dollars
- for an Apple product called the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, or MPW.
- MPW had competitors, but it was unquestionably the premier software
- development system for the Mac. It was what Apple's own engineers used to
- write Macintosh code. Given that MacOS was far more technologically
- advanced, at the time, than its competition, and that Linux did not even
- exist yet, and given that this was the actual program used by Apple's
- world-class team of creative engineers, I had high expectations. It arrived
- on a stack of floppy disks about a foot high, and so there was plenty of
- time for my excitement to build during the endless installation process.
- The first time I launched MPW, I was probably expecting some kind of
- touch-feely multimedia showcase. Instead it was austere, almost to the
- point of being intimidating. It was a scrolling window into which you could
- type simple, unformatted text. The system would then interpret these lines
- of text as commands, and try to execute them.
- It was, in other words, a glass teletype running a command line interface.
- It came with all sorts of cryptic but powerful commands, which could be
- invoked by typing their names, and which I learned to use only gradually.
- It was not until a few years later, when I began messing around with Unix,
- that I understood that the command line interface embodied in MPW was a
- re-creation of Unix.
- In other words, the first thing that Apple's hackers had done when they'd
- got the MacOS up and running--probably even before they'd gotten it up and
- running--was to re-create the Unix interface, so that they would be able to
- get some useful work done. At the time, I simply couldn't get my mind
- around this, but: as far as Apple's hackers were concerned, the Mac's
- vaunted Graphical User Interface was an impediment, something to be
- circumvented before the little toaster even came out onto the market.
- Even before my Powerbook crashed and obliterated my big file in July 1995,
- there had been danger signs. An old college buddy of mine, who starts and
- runs high-tech companies in Boston, had developed a commercial product
- using Macintoshes as the front end. Basically the Macs were
- high-performance graphics terminals, chosen for their sweet user interface,
- giving users access to a large database of graphical information stored on
- a network of much more powerful, but less user-friendly, computers. This
- fellow was the second person who turned me on to Macintoshes, by the way,
- and through the mid-1980's we had shared the thrill of being high-tech
- cognoscenti, using superior Apple technology in a world of DOS-using
- knuckleheads. Early versions of my friend's system had worked well, he told
- me, but when several machines joined the network, mysterious crashes began
- to occur; sometimes the whole network would just freeze. It was one of
- those bugs that could not be reproduced easily. Finally they figured out
- that these network crashes were triggered whenever a user, scanning the
- menus for a particular item, held down the mouse button for more than a
- couple of seconds.
- Fundamentally, the MacOS could only do one thing at a time. Drawing a menu
- on the screen is one thing. So when a menu was pulled down, the Macintosh
- was not capable of doing anything else until that indecisive user released
- the button.
- This is not such a bad thing in a single-user, single-process machine
- (although it's a fairly bad thing), but it's no good in a machine that is
- on a network, because being on a network implies some kind of continual
- low-level interaction with other machines. By failing to respond to the
- network, the Mac caused a network-wide crash.
- In order to work with other computers, and with networks, and with various
- different types of hardware, an OS must be incomparably more complicated
- and powerful than either MS-DOS or the original MacOS. The only way of
- connecting to the Internet that's worth taking seriously is PPP, the
- Point-to-Point Protocol, which (never mind the details) makes your
- computer--temporarily--a full-fledged member of the Global Internet, with
- its own unique address, and various privileges, powers, and
- responsibilities appertaining thereunto. Technically it means your machine
- is running the TCP/IP protocol, which, to make a long story short, revolves
- around sending packets of data back and forth, in no particular order, and
- at unpredictable times, according to a clever and elegant set of rules. But
- sending a packet of data is one thing, and so an OS that can only do one
- thing at a time cannot simultaneously be part of the Internet and do
- anything else. When TCP/IP was invented, running it was an honor reserved
- for Serious Computers--mainframes and high-powered minicomputers used in
- technical and commercial settings--and so the protocol is engineered around
- the assumption that every computer using it is a serious machine, capable
- of doing many things at once. Not to put too fine a point on it, a Unix
- machine. Neither MacOS nor MS-DOS was originally built with that in mind,
- and so when the Internet got hot, radical changes had to be made.
- 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.
- I must have been reeling around the offices of Electric Communities in some
- kind of primal Jungian fugue, because at this moment three weirdly
- synchronistic things happened.
- (1) Randy Farmer, a co-founder of the company, came in for a quick visit
- along with his family--he was recovering from back surgery at the time. He
- had some hot gossip: "Windows 95 mastered today." What this meant was that
- Microsoft's new operating system had, on this day, been placed on a special
- compact disk known as a golden master, which would be used to stamp out a
- jintillion copies in preparation for its thunderous release a few weeks
- later. This news was received peevishly by the staff of Electric
- Communities, including one whose office door was plastered with the usual
- assortment of cartoons and novelties, e.g.
- (2) a copy of a Dilbert cartoon in which Dilbert, the long-suffering
- corporate software engineer, encounters a portly, bearded, hairy man of a
- certain age--a bit like Santa Claus, but darker, with a certain edge about
- him. Dilbert recognizes this man, based upon his appearance and affect, as
- a Unix hacker, and reacts with a certain mixture of nervousness, awe, and
- hostility. Dilbert jabs weakly at the disturbing interloper for a couple of
- frames; the Unix hacker listens with a kind of infuriating, beatific calm,
- then, in the last frame, reaches into his pocket. "Here's a nickel, kid,"
- he says, "go buy yourself a real computer."
- (3) the owner of the door, and the cartoon, was one Doug Barnes. Barnes was
- known to harbor certain heretical opinions on the subject of operating
- systems. Unlike most Bay Area techies who revered the Macintosh,
- considering it to be a true hacker's machine, Barnes was fond of pointing
- out that the Mac, with its hermetically sealed architecture, was actually
- hostile to hackers, who are prone to tinkering and dogmatic about openness.
- By contrast, the IBM-compatible line of machines, which can easily be taken
- apart and plugged back together, was much more hackable.
- So when I got home I began messing around with Linux, which is one of many,
- many different concrete implementations of the abstract, Platonic ideal
- called Unix. I was not looking forward to changing over to a new OS,
- because my credit cards were still smoking from all the money I'd spent on
- Mac hardware over the years. But Linux's great virtue was, and is, that it
- would run on exactly the same sort of hardware as the Microsoft OSes--which
- is to say, the cheapest hardware in existence. As if to demonstrate why
- this was a great idea, I was, within a week or two of returning home, able
- to get my hand on a then-decent computer (a 33-MHz 486 box) for free,
- because I knew a guy who worked in an office where they were simply being
- thrown away. Once I got it home, I yanked the hood off, stuck my hands in,
- and began switching cards around. If something didn't work, I went to a
- used-computer outlet and pawed through a bin full of components and bought
- a new card for a few bucks.
- The availability of all this cheap but effective hardware was an unintended
- consequence of decisions that had been made more than a decade earlier by
- IBM and Microsoft. When Windows came out, and brought the GUI to a much
- larger market, the hardware regime changed: the cost of color video cards
- and high-resolution monitors began to drop, and is dropping still. This
- free-for-all approach to hardware meant that Windows was unavoidably clunky
- compared to MacOS. But the GUI brought computing to such a vast audience
- that volume went way up and prices collapsed. Meanwhile Apple, which so
- badly wanted a clean, integrated OS with video neatly integrated into
- processing hardware, had fallen far behind in market share, at least partly
- because their beautiful hardware cost so much.
- But the price that we Mac owners had to pay for superior aesthetics and
- engineering was not merely a financial one. There was a cultural price too,
- stemming from the fact that we couldn't open up the hood and mess around
- with it. Doug Barnes was right. Apple, in spite of its reputation as the
- machine of choice of scruffy, creative hacker types, had actually created a
- machine that discouraged hacking, while Microsoft, viewed as a
- technological laggard and copycat, had created a vast, disorderly parts
- bazaar--a primordial soup that eventually self-assembled into Linux.
- 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 ORAL TRADITION
- Unix is hard to learn. The process of learning it is one of multiple small
- epiphanies. Typically you are just on the verge of inventing some necessary
- tool or utility when you realize that someone else has already invented it,
- and built it in, and this explains some odd file or directory or command
- that you have noticed but never really understood before.
- For example there is a command (a small program, part of the OS) called
- whoami, which enables you to ask the computer who it thinks you are. On a
- Unix machine, you are always logged in under some name--possibly even your
- own! What files you may work with, and what software you may use, depends
- on your identity. When I started out using Linux, I was on a non-networked
- machine in my basement, with only one user account, and so when I became
- aware of the whoami command it struck me as ludicrous. But once you are
- logged in as one person, you can temporarily switch over to a pseudonym in
- order to access different files. If your machine is on the Internet, you
- can log onto other computers, provided you have a user name and a password.
- At that point the distant machine becomes no different in practice from the
- one right in front of you. These changes in identity and location can
- easily become nested inside each other, many layers deep, even if you
- aren't doing anything nefarious. Once you have forgotten who and where you
- are, the whoami command is indispensible. I use it all the time.
- The file systems of Unix machines all have the same general structure. On
- your flimsy operating systems, you can create directories (folders) and
- give them names like Frodo or My Stuff and put them pretty much anywhere
- you like. But under Unix the highest level--the root--of the filesystem is
- always designated with the single character "/" and it always contains the
- same set of top-level directories:
- /usr
- /etc
- /var
- /bin
- /proc
- /boot
- /home
- /root
- /sbin
- /dev
- /lib
- /tmp
- and each of these directories typically has its own distinct structure of
- subdirectories. Note the obsessive use of abbreviations and avoidance of
- capital letters; this is a system invented by people to whom repetitive
- stress disorder is what black lung is to miners. Long names get worn down
- to three-letter nubbins, like stones smoothed by a river.
- This is not the place to try to explain why each of the above directories
- exists, and what is contained in it. At first it all seems obscure; worse,
- it seems deliberately obscure. When I started using Linux I was accustomed
- to being able to create directories wherever I wanted and to give them
- whatever names struck my fancy. Under Unix you are free to do that, of
- course (you are free to do anything) but as you gain experience with the
- system you come to understand that the directories listed above were
- created for the best of reasons and that your life will be much easier if
- you follow along (within /home, by the way, you have pretty much unlimited
- freedom).
- After this kind of thing has happened several hundred or thousand times,
- the hacker understands why Unix is the way it is, and agrees that it
- wouldn't be the same any other way. It is this sort of acculturation that
- gives Unix hackers their confidence in the system, and the attitude of
- calm, unshakable, annoying superiority captured in the Dilbert cartoon.
- Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of
- specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a
- painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our
- Gilgamesh epic.
- What made old epics like Gilgamesh so powerful and so long-lived was that
- they were living bodies of narrative that many people knew by heart, and
- told over and over again--making their own personal embellishments whenever
- it struck their fancy. The bad embellishments were shouted down, the good
- ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated
- into the story. Likewise, Unix is known, loved, and understood by so many
- hackers that it can be re-created from scratch whenever someone needs it.
- This is very difficult to understand for people who are accustomed to
- thinking of OSes as things that absolutely have to be bought.
- Many hackers have launched more or less successful re-implementations of
- the Unix ideal. Each one brings in new embellishments. Some of them die out
- quickly, some are merged with similar, parallel innovations created by
- different hackers attacking the same problem, others still are embraced,
- and adopted into the epic. Thus Unix has slowly accreted around a simple
- kernel and acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is
- organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery.
- Understanding it is more like anatomy than physics.
- For at least a year, prior to my adoption of Linux, I had been hearing
- about it. Credible, well-informed people kept telling me that a bunch of
- hackers had got together an implentation of Unix that could be downloaded,
- free of charge, from the Internet. For a long time I could not bring myself
- to take the notion seriously. It was like hearing rumors that a group of
- model rocket enthusiasts had created a completely functional Saturn V by
- exchanging blueprints on the Net and mailing valves and flanges to each
- other.
- But it's true. Credit for Linux generally goes to its human namesake, one
- Linus Torvalds, a Finn who got the whole thing rolling in 1991 when he used
- some of the GNU tools to write the beginnings of a Unix kernel that could
- run on PC-compatible hardware. And indeed Torvalds deserves all the credit
- he has ever gotten, and a whole lot more. But he could not have made it
- happen by himself, any more than Richard Stallman could have. To write code
- at all, Torvalds had to have cheap but powerful development tools, and
- these he got from Stallman's GNU project.
- And he had to have cheap hardware on which to write that code. Cheap
- hardware is a much harder thing to arrange than cheap software; a single
- person (Stallman) can write software and put it up on the Net for free, but
- in order to make hardware it's necessary to have a whole industrial
- infrastructure, which is not cheap by any stretch of the imagination.
- Really the only way to make hardware cheap is to punch out an incredible
- number of copies of it, so that the unit cost eventually drops. For reasons
- already explained, Apple had no desire to see the cost of hardware drop.
- The only reason Torvalds had cheap hardware was Microsoft.
- Microsoft refused to go into the hardware business, insisted on making its
- software run on hardware that anyone could build, and thereby created the
- market conditions that allowed hardware prices to plummet. In trying to
- understand the Linux phenomenon, then, we have to look not to a single
- innovator but to a sort of bizarre Trinity: Linus Torvalds, Richard
- Stallman, and Bill Gates. Take away any of these three and Linux would not
- exist.
- OS SHOCK
- Young Americans who leave their great big homogeneous country and visit
- some other part of the world typically go through several stages of culture
- shock: first, dumb wide-eyed astonishment. Then a tentative engagement with
- the new country's manners, cuisine, public transit systems and toilets,
- leading to a brief period of fatuous confidence that they are instant
- experts on the new country. As the visit wears on, homesickness begins to
- set in, and the traveler begins to appreciate, for the first time, how much
- he or she took for granted at home. At the same time it begins to seem
- obvious that many of one's own cultures and traditions are essentially
- arbitrary, and could have been different; driving on the right side of the
- road, for example. When the traveler returns home and takes stock of the
- experience, he or she may have learned a good deal more about America than
- about the country they went to visit.
- For the same reasons, Linux is worth trying. It is a strange country
- indeed, but you don't have to live there; a brief sojourn suffices to give
- some flavor of the place and--more importantly--to lay bare everything that
- is taken for granted, and all that could have been done differently, under
- Windows or MacOS.
- You can't try it unless you install it. With any other OS, installing it
- would be a straightforward transaction: in exchange for money, some company
- would give you a CD-ROM, and you would be on your way. But a lot is
- subsumed in that kind of transaction, and has to be gone through and picked
- apart.
- We like plain dealings and straightforward transactions in America. If you
- go to Egypt and, say, take a taxi somewhere, you become a part of the taxi
- driver's life; he refuses to take your money because it would demean your
- friendship, he follows you around town, and weeps hot tears when you get in
- some other guy's taxi. You end up meeting his kids at some point, and have
- to devote all sort of ingenuity to finding some way to compensate him
- without insulting his honor. It is exhausting. Sometimes you just want a
- simple Manhattan-style taxi ride.
- But in order to have an American-style setup, where you can just go out and
- hail a taxi and be on your way, there must exist a whole hidden apparatus
- of medallions, inspectors, commissions, and so forth--which is fine as long
- as taxis are cheap and you can always get one. When the system fails to
- work in some way, it is mysterious and infuriating and turns otherwise
- reasonable people into conspiracy theorists. But when the Egyptian system
- breaks down, it breaks down transparently. You can't get a taxi, but your
- driver's nephew will show up, on foot, to explain the problem and
- apologize.
- Microsoft and Apple do things the Manhattan way, with vast complexity
- hidden behind a wall of interface. Linux does things the Egypt way, with
- vast complexity strewn about all over the landscape. If you've just flown
- in from Manhattan, your first impulse will be to throw up your hands and
- say "For crying out loud! Will you people get a grip on yourselves!?" But
- this does not make friends in Linux-land any better than it would in Egypt.
- You can suck Linux right out of the air, as it were, by downloading the
- right files and putting them in the right places, but there probably are
- not more than a few hundred people in the world who could create a
- functioning Linux system in that way. What you really need is a
- distribution of Linux, which means a prepackaged set of files. But
- distributions are a separate thing from Linux per se.
- Linux per se is not a specific set of ones and zeroes, but a
- self-organizing Net subculture. The end result of its collective
- lucubrations is a vast body of source code, almost all written in C (the
- dominant computer programming language). "Source code" just means a
- computer program as typed in and edited by some hacker. If it's in C, the
- file name will probably have .c or .cpp on the end of it, depending on
- which dialect was used; if it's in some other language it will have some
- other suffix. Frequently these sorts of files can be found in a directory
- with the name /src which is the hacker's Hebraic abbreviation of "source."
- Source files are useless to your computer, and of little interest to most
- users, but they are of gigantic cultural and political significance,
- because Microsoft and Apple keep them secret while Linux makes them public.
- They are the family jewels. They are the sort of thing that in Hollywood
- thrillers is used as a McGuffin: the plutonium bomb core, the top-secret
- blueprints, the suitcase of bearer bonds, the reel of microfilm. If the
- source files for Windows or MacOS were made public on the Net, then those
- OSes would become free, like Linux--only not as good, because no one would
- be around to fix bugs and answer questions. Linux is "open source" software
- meaning, simply, that anyone can get copies of its source code files.
- Your computer doesn't want source code any more than you do; it wants
- object code. Object code files typically have the suffix .o and are
- unreadable all but a few, highly strange humans, because they consist of
- ones and zeroes. Accordingly, this sort of file commonly shows up in a
- directory with the name /bin, for "binary."
- Source files are simply ASCII text files. ASCII denotes a particular way of
- encoding letters into bit patterns. In an ASCII file, each character has
- eight bits all to itself. This creates a potential "alphabet" of 256
- distinct characters, in that eight binary digits can form that many unique
- patterns. In practice, of course, we tend to limit ourselves to the
- familiar letters and digits. The bit-patterns used to represent those
- letters and digits are the same ones that were physically punched into the
- paper tape by my high school teletype, which in turn were the same one used
- by the telegraph industry for decades previously. ASCII text files, in
- other words, are telegrams, and as such they have no typographical frills.
- But for the same reason they are eternal, because the code never changes,
- and universal, because every text editing and word processing software ever
- written knows about this code.
- Therefore just about any software can be used to create, edit, and read
- source code files. Object code files, then, are created from these source
- files by a piece of software called a compiler, and forged into a working
- application by another piece of software called a linker.
- The triad of editor, compiler, and linker, taken together, form the core of
- a software development system. Now, it is possible to spend a lot of money
- on shrink-wrapped development systems with lovely graphical user interfaces
- and various ergonomic enhancements. In some cases it might even be a good
- and reasonable way to spend money. But on this side of the road, as it
- were, the very best software is usually the free stuff. Editor, compiler
- and linker are to hackers what ponies, stirrups, and archery sets were to
- the Mongols. Hackers live in the saddle, and hack on their own tools even
- while they are using them to create new applications. It is quite
- inconceivable that superior hacking tools could have been created from a
- blank sheet of paper by product engineers. Even if they are the brightest
- engineers in the world they are simply outnumbered.
- In the GNU/Linux world there are two major text editing programs: the
- minimalist vi (known in some implementations as elvis) and the maximalist
- emacs. I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word
- processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written
- in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is
- colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say,
- no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours
- that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail
- merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate
- memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on
- the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a
- professional writer--i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about
- how your words are formatted and printed--emacs outshines all other editing
- software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars.
- It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.
- For page layout and printing you can use TeX: a vast corpus of typesetting
- lore written in C and also available on the Net for free.
- I could say a lot about emacs and TeX, but right now I am trying to tell a
- story about how to actually install Linux on your machine. The hard-core
- survivalist approach would be to download an editor like emacs, and the GNU
- Tools--the compiler and linker--which are polished and excellent to the
- same degree as emacs. Equipped with these, one would be able to start
- downloading ASCII source code files (/src) and compiling them into binary
- object code files (/bin) that would run on the machine. But in order to
- even arrive at this point--to get emacs running, for example--you have to
- have Linux actually up and running on your machine. And even a minimal
- Linux operating system requires thousands of binary files all acting in
- concert, and arranged and linked together just so.
- Several entities have therefore taken it upon themselves to create
- "distributions" of Linux. If I may extend the Egypt analogy slightly, these
- entities are a bit like tour guides who meet you at the airport, who speak
- your language, and who help guide you through the initial culture shock. If
- you are an Egyptian, of course, you see it the other way; tour guides exist
- to keep brutish outlanders from traipsing through your mosques and asking
- you the same questions over and over and over again.
- Some of these tour guides are commercial organizations, such as Red Hat
- Software, which makes a Linux distribution called Red Hat that has a
- relatively commercial sheen to it. In most cases you put a Red Hat CD-ROM
- into your PC and reboot and it handles the rest. Just as a tour guide in
- Egypt will expect some sort of compensation for his services, commercial
- distributions need to be paid for. In most cases they cost almost nothing
- and are well worth it.
- I use a distribution called Debian (the word is a contraction of "Deborah"
- and "Ian") which is non-commercial. It is organized (or perhaps I should
- say "it has organized itself") along the same lines as Linux in general,
- which is to say that it consists of volunteers who collaborate over the
- Net, each responsible for looking after a different chunk of the system.
- These people have broken Linux down into a number of packages, which are
- compressed files that can be downloaded to an already functioning Debian
- Linux system, then opened up and unpacked using a free installer
- application. Of course, as such, Debian has no commercial arm--no
- distribution mechanism. You can download all Debian packages over the Net,
- but most people will want to have them on a CD-ROM. Several different
- companies have taken it upon themselves to decoct all of the current Debian
- packages onto CD-ROMs and then sell them. I buy mine from Linux Systems
- Labs. The cost for a three-disc set, containing Debian in its entirety, is
- less than three dollars. But (and this is an important distinction) not a
- single penny of that three dollars is going to any of the coders who
- created Linux, nor to the Debian packagers. It goes to Linux Systems Labs
- and it pays, not for the software, or the packages, but for the cost of
- stamping out the CD-ROMs.
- Every Linux distribution embodies some more or less clever hack for
- circumventing the normal boot process and causing your computer, when it is
- turned on, to organize itself, not as a PC running Windows, but as a "host"
- running Unix. This is slightly alarming the first time you see it, but
- completely harmless. When a PC boots up, it goes through a little self-test
- routine, taking an inventory of available disks and memory, and then begins
- looking around for a disk to boot up from. In any normal Windows computer
- that disk will be a hard drive. But if you have your system configured
- right, it will look first for a floppy or CD-ROM disk, and boot from that
- if one is available.
- Linux exploits this chink in the defenses. Your computer notices a bootable
- disk in the floppy or CD-ROM drive, loads in some object code from that
- disk, and blindly begins to execute it. But this is not Microsoft or Apple
- code, this is Linux code, and so at this point your computer begins to
- behave very differently from what you are accustomed to. Cryptic messages
- began to scroll up the screen. If you had booted a commercial OS, you
- would, at this point, be seeing a "Welcome to MacOS" cartoon, or a screen
- filled with clouds in a blue sky, and a Windows logo. But under Linux you
- get a long telegram printed in stark white letters on a black screen. There
- is no "welcome!" message. Most of the telegram has the semi-inscrutable
- menace of graffiti tags.
- Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev syslogd 1.3-3#17: restart. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev
- kernel: klogd 1.3-3, log source = /proc/kmsg started. Dec 14 15:04:15
- theRev kernel: Loaded 3535 symbols from /System.map. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev
- kernel: Symbols match kernel version 2.0.30. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel:
- No module symbols loaded. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Intel
- MultiProcessor Specification v1.4 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Virtual
- Wire compatibility mode. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: OEM ID: INTEL
- Product ID: 440FX APIC at: 0xFEE00000 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel:
- Processor #0 Pentium(tm) Pro APIC version 17 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel:
- Processor #1 Pentium(tm) Pro APIC version 17 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel:
- I/O APIC #2 Version 17 at 0xFEC00000. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel:
- Processors: 2 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Console: 16 point font, 400
- scans Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Console: colour VGA+ 80x25, 1 virtual
- console (max 63) Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: pcibios_init : BIOS32
- Service Directory structure at 0x000fdb70 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel:
- pcibios_init : BIOS32 Service Directory entry at 0xfdb80 Dec 14 15:04:15
- theRev kernel: pcibios_init : PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xfdba1 Dec
- 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Probing PCI hardware. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev
- kernel: Warning : Unknown PCI device (10b7:9001). Please read
- include/linux/pci.h Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Calibrating delay loop..
- ok - 179.40 BogoMIPS Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Memory: 64268k/66556k
- available (700k kernel code, 384k reserved, 1204k data) Dec 14 15:04:15
- theRev kernel: Swansea University Computer Society NET3.035 for Linux 2.0
- Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: NET3: Unix domain sockets 0.13 for Linux
- NET3.035. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Swansea University Computer
- Society TCP/IP for NET3.034 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: IP Protocols:
- ICMP, UDP, TCP Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Checking 386/387 coupling...
- Ok, fpu using exception 16 error reporting. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel:
- Checking 'hlt' instruction... Ok. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Linux
- version 2.0.30 (root@theRev) (gcc version 2.7.2.1) #15 Fri Mar 27 16:37:24
- PST 1998 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Booting processor 1 stack 00002000:
- Calibrating delay loop.. ok - 179.40 BogoMIPS Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev
- kernel: Total of 2 processors activated (358.81 BogoMIPS). Dec 14 15:04:15
- theRev kernel: Serial driver version 4.13 with no serial options enabled
- Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: tty00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A Dec 14
- 15:04:15 theRev kernel: tty01 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A Dec 14
- 15:04:15 theRev kernel: lp1 at 0x0378, (polling) Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev
- kernel: PS/2 auxiliary pointing device detected -- driver installed. Dec 14
- 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Real Time Clock Driver v1.07 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev
- kernel: loop: registered device at major 7 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel:
- ide: i82371 PIIX (Triton) on PCI bus 0 function 57 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev
- kernel: ide0: BM-DMA at 0xffa0-0xffa7 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: ide1:
- BM-DMA at 0xffa8-0xffaf Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: hda: Conner
- Peripherals 1275MB - CFS1275A, 1219MB w/64kB Cache, LBA, CHS=619/64/63 Dec
- 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: hdb: Maxtor 84320A5, 4119MB w/256kB Cache, LBA,
- CHS=8928/15/63, DMA Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: hdc: , ATAPI CDROM drive
- Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14 Dec 15
- 11:58:06 theRev kernel: ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15 Dec 15 11:58:06
- theRev kernel: Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel:
- Started kswapd v 1.4.2.2 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: FDC 0 is a National
- Semiconductor PC87306 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: md driver 0.35
- MAX_MD_DEV=4, MAX_REAL=8 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: PPP: version 2.2.0
- (dynamic channel allocation) Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: TCP compression
- code copyright 1989 Regents of the University of California Dec 15 11:58:06
- theRev kernel: PPP Dynamic channel allocation code copyright 1995 Caldera,
- Inc. Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: PPP line discipline registered. Dec 15
- 11:58:06 theRev kernel: SLIP: version 0.8.4-NET3.019-NEWTTY (dynamic
- channels, max=256). Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: eth0: 3Com 3c900
- Boomerang 10Mbps/Combo at 0xef00, 00:60:08:a4:3c:db, IRQ 10 Dec 15 11:58:06
- theRev kernel: 8K word-wide RAM 3:5 Rx:Tx split, 10base2 interface. Dec 15
- 11:58:06 theRev kernel: Enabling bus-master transmits and whole-frame
- receives. Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: 3c59x.c:v0.49 1/2/98 Donald Becker
- http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/vortex.html Dec 15 11:58:06
- theRev kernel: Partition check: Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: hda: hda1
- hda2 hda3 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: hdb: hdb1 hdb2 Dec 15 11:58:06
- theRev kernel: VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly. Dec 15
- 11:58:06 theRev kernel: Adding Swap: 16124k swap-space (priority -1) Dec 15
- 11:58:06 theRev kernel: EXT2-fs warning: maximal mount count reached,
- running e2fsck is recommended Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: hdc: media
- changed Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: ISO9660 Extensions: RRIP_1991A Dec
- 15 11:58:07 theRev syslogd 1.3-3#17: restart. Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev
- diald[87]: Unable to open options file /etc/diald/diald.options: No such
- file or directory Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev diald[87]: No device specified.
- You must have at least one device! Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev diald[87]: You
- must define a connector script (option 'connect'). Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev
- diald[87]: You must define the remote ip address. Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev
- diald[87]: You must define the local ip address. Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev
- diald[87]: Terminating due to damaged reconfigure.
- The only parts of this that are readable, for normal people, are the error
- messages and warnings. And yet it's noteworthy that Linux doesn't stop, or
- crash, when it encounters an error; it spits out a pithy complaint, gives
- up on whatever processes were damaged, and keeps on rolling. This was
- decidedly not true of the early versions of Apple and Microsoft OSes, for
- the simple reason that an OS that is not capable of walking and chewing gum
- at the same time cannot possibly recover from errors. Looking for, and
- dealing with, errors requires a separate process running in parallel with
- the one that has erred. A kind of superego, if you will, that keeps an eye
- on all of the others, and jumps in when one goes astray. Now that MacOS and
- Windows can do more than one thing at a time they are much better at
- dealing with errors than they used to be, but they are not even close to
- Linux or other Unices in this respect; and their greater complexity has
- made them vulnerable to new types of errors.
- FALLIBILITY, ATONEMENT, REDEMPTION, TRUST, AND OTHER ARCANE TECHNICAL
- CONCEPTS
- Linux is not capable of having any centrally organized policies dictating
- how to write error messages and documentation, and so each programmer
- writes his own. Usually they are in English even though tons of Linux
- programmers are Europeans. Frequently they are funny. Always they are
- honest. If something bad has happened because the software simply isn't
- finished yet, or because the user screwed something up, this will be stated
- forthrightly. The command line interface makes it easy for programs to
- dribble out little comments, warnings, and messages here and there. Even if
- the application is imploding like a damaged submarine, it can still usually
- eke out a little S.O.S. message. Sometimes when you finish working with a
- program and shut it down, you find that it has left behind a series of mild
- warnings and low-grade error messages in the command-line interface window
- from which you launched it. As if the software were chatting to you about
- how it was doing the whole time you were working with it.
- Documentation, under Linux, comes in the form of man (short for manual)
- pages. You can access these either through a GUI (xman) or from the command
- line (man). Here is a sample from the man page for a program called rsh:
- "Stop signals stop the local rsh process only; this is arguably wrong, but
- currently hard to fix for reasons too complicated to explain here."
- The man pages contain a lot of such material, which reads like the terse
- mutterings of pilots wrestling with the controls of damaged airplanes. The
- general feel is of a thousand monumental but obscure struggles seen in the
- stop-action light of a strobe. Each programmer is dealing with his own
- obstacles and bugs; he is too busy fixing them, and improving the software,
- to explain things at great length or to maintain elaborate pretensions.
- In practice you hardly ever encounter a serious bug while running Linux.
- When you do, it is almost always with commercial software (several vendors
- sell software that runs under Linux). The operating system and its
- fundamental utility programs are too important to contain serious bugs. I
- have been running Linux every day since late 1995 and have seen many
- application programs go down in flames, but I have never seen the operating
- system crash. Never. Not once. There are quite a few Linux systems that
- have been running continuously and working hard for months or years without
- needing to be rebooted.
- Commercial OSes have to adopt the same official stance towards errors as
- Communist countries had towards poverty. For doctrinal reasons it was not
- possible to admit that poverty was a serious problem in Communist
- countries, because the whole point of Communism was to eradicate poverty.
- Likewise, commercial OS companies like Apple and Microsoft can't go around
- admitting that their software has bugs and that it crashes all the time,
- any more than Disney can issue press releases stating that Mickey Mouse is
- an actor in a suit.
- This is a problem, because errors do exist and bugs do happen. Every few
- months Bill Gates tries to demo a new Microsoft product in front of a large
- audience only to have it blow up in his face. Commercial OS vendors, as a
- direct consequence of being commercial, are forced to adopt the grossly
- disingenuous position that bugs are rare aberrations, usually someone
- else's fault, and therefore not really worth talking about in any detail.
- This posture, which everyone knows to be absurd, is not limited to press
- releases and ad campaigns. It informs the whole way these companies do
- business and relate to their customers. If the documentation were properly
- written, it would mention bugs, errors, and crashes on every single page.
- If the on-line help systems that come with these OSes reflected the
- experiences and concerns of their users, they would largely be devoted to
- instructions on how to cope with crashes and errors.
- But this does not happen. Joint stock corporations are wonderful inventions
- that have given us many excellent goods and services. They are good at many
- things. Admitting failure is not one of them. Hell, they can't even admit
- minor shortcomings.
- Of course, this behavior is not as pathological in a corporation as it
- would be in a human being. Most people, nowadays, understand that corporate
- press releases are issued for the benefit of the corporation's shareholders
- and not for the enlightenment of the public. Sometimes the results of this
- institutional dishonesty can be dreadful, as with tobacco and asbestos. In
- the case of commercial OS vendors it is nothing of the kind, of course; it
- is merely annoying.
- Some might argue that consumer annoyance, over time, builds up into a kind
- of hardened plaque that can conceal serious decay, and that honesty might
- therefore be the best policy in the long run; the jury is still out on this
- in the operating system market. The business is expanding fast enough that
- it's still much better to have billions of chronically annoyed customers
- than millions of happy ones.
- Most system administrators I know who work with Windows NT all the time
- agree that when it hits a snag, it has to be re-booted, and when it gets
- seriously messed up, the only way to fix it is to re-install the operating
- system from scratch. Or at least this is the only way that they know of to
- fix it, which amounts to the same thing. It is quite possible that the
- engineers at Microsoft have all sorts of insider knowledge on how to fix
- the system when it goes awry, but if they do, they do not seem to be
- getting the message out to any of the actual system administrators I know.
- Because Linux is not commercial--because it is, in fact, free, as well as
- rather difficult to obtain, install, and operate--it does not have to
- maintain any pretensions as to its reliability. Consequently, it is much
- more reliable. When something goes wrong with Linux, the error is noticed
- and loudly discussed right away. Anyone with the requisite technical
- knowledge can go straight to the source code and point out the source of
- the error, which is then rapidly fixed by whichever hacker has carved out
- responsibility for that particular program.
- As far as I know, Debian is the only Linux distribution that has its own
- constitution (http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution), but what really
- sold me on it was its phenomenal bug database (http://www.debian.org/Bugs),
- which is a sort of interactive Doomsday Book of error, fallibility, and
- redemption. It is simplicity itself. When had a problem with Debian in
- early January of 1997, I sent in a message describing the problem to
- submit@bugs.debian.org. My problem was promptly assigned a bug report
- number (#6518) and a severity level (the available choices being critical,
- grave, important, normal, fixed, and wishlist) and forwarded to mailing
- lists where Debian people hang out. Within twenty-four hours I had received
- five e-mails telling me how to fix the problem: two from North America, two
- from Europe, and one from Australia. All of these e-mails gave me the same
- suggestion, which worked, and made my problem go away. But at the same
- time, a transcript of this exchange was posted to Debian's bug database, so
- that if other users had the same problem later, they would be able to
- search through and find the solution without having to enter a new,
- redundant bug report.
- Contrast this with the experience that I had when I tried to install
- Windows NT 4.0 on the very same machine about ten months later, in late
- 1997. The installation program simply stopped in the middle with no error
- messages. I went to the Microsoft Support website and tried to perform a
- search for existing help documents that would address my problem. The
- search engine was completely nonfunctional; it did nothing at all. It did
- not even give me a message telling me that it was not working.
- Eventually I decided that my motherboard must be at fault; it was of a
- slightly unusual make and model, and NT did not support as many different
- motherboards as Linux. I am always looking for excuses, no matter how
- feeble, to buy new hardware, so I bought a new motherboard that was Windows
- NT logo-compatible, meaning that the Windows NT logo was printed right on
- the box. I installed this into my computer and got Linux running right
- away, then attempted to install Windows NT again. Again, the installation
- died without any error message or explanation. By this time a couple of
- weeks had gone by and I thought that perhaps the search engine on the
- Microsoft Support website might be up and running. I gave that a try but it
- still didn't work.
- So I created a new Microsoft support account, then logged on to submit the
- incident. I supplied my product ID number when asked, and then began to
- follow the instructions on a series of help screens. In other words, I was
- submitting a bug report just as with the Debian bug tracking system. It's
- just that the interface was slicker--I was typing my complaint into little
- text-editing boxes on Web forms, doing it all through the GUI, whereas with
- Debian you send in an e-mail telegram. I knew that when I was finished
- submitting the bug report, it would become proprietary Microsoft
- information, and other users wouldn't be able to see it. Many Linux users
- would refuse to participate in such a scheme on ethical grounds, but I was
- willing to give it a shot as an experiment. In the end, though I was never
- able to submit my bug report, because the series of linked web pages that I
- was filling out eventually led me to a completely blank page: a dead end.
- So I went back and clicked on the buttons for "phone support" and
- eventually was given a Microsoft telephone number. When I dialed this
- number I got a series of piercing beeps and a recorded message from the
- phone company saying "We're sorry, your call cannot be completed as
- dialed."
- I tried the search page again--it was still completely nonfunctional. Then
- I tried PPI (Pay Per Incident) again. This led me through another series of
- Web pages until I dead-ended at one reading: "Notice-there is no Web page
- matching your request."
- I tried it again, and eventually got to a Pay Per Incident screen reading:
- "OUT OF INCIDENTS. There are no unused incidents left in your account. If
- you would like to purchase a support incident, click OK-you will then be
- able to prepay for an incident...." The cost per incident was $95.
- The experiment was beginning to seem rather expensive, so I gave up on the
- PPI approach and decided to have a go at the FAQs posted on Microsoft's
- website. None of the available FAQs had anything to do with my problem
- except for one entitled "I am having some problems installing NT" which
- appeared to have been written by flacks, not engineers.
- So I gave up and still, to this day, have never gotten Windows NT installed
- on that particular machine. For me, the path of least resistance was simply
- to use Debian Linux.
- In the world of open source software, bug reports are useful information.
- Making them public is a service to other users, and improves the OS. Making
- them public systematically is so important that highly intelligent people
- voluntarily put time and money into running bug databases. In the
- commercial OS world, however, reporting a bug is a privilege that you have
- to pay lots of money for. But if you pay for it, it follows that the bug
- report must be kept confidential--otherwise anyone could get the benefit of
- your ninety-five bucks! And yet nothing prevents NT users from setting up
- their own public bug database.
- This is, in other words, another feature of the OS market that simply makes
- no sense unless you view it in the context of culture. What Microsoft is
- selling through Pay Per Incident isn't technical support so much as the
- continued illusion that its customers are engaging in some kind of rational
- business transaction. It is a sort of routine maintenance fee for the
- upkeep of the fantasy. If people really wanted a solid OS they would use
- Linux, and if they really wanted tech support they would find a way to get
- it; Microsoft's customers want something else.
- As of this writing (Jan. 1999), something like 32,000 bugs have been
- reported to the Debian Linux bug database. Almost all of them have been
- fixed a long time ago. There are twelve "critical" bugs still outstanding,
- of which the oldest was posted 79 days ago. There are 20 outstanding
- "grave" bugs of which the oldest is 1166 days old. There are 48 "important"
- bugs and hundreds of "normal" and less important ones.
- Likewise, BeOS (which I'll get to in a minute) has its own bug database
- (http://www.be.com/developers/bugs/index.html) with its own classification
- system, including such categories as "Not a Bug," "Acknowledged Feature,"
- and "Will Not Fix." Some of the "bugs" here are nothing more than Be
- hackers blowing off steam, and are classified as "Input Acknowledged." For
- example, I found one that was posted on December 30th, 1998. It's in the
- middle of a long list of bugs, wedged between one entitled "Mouse working
- in very strange fashion" and another called "Change of BView frame does not
- affect, if BView not attached to a BWindow."
- This one is entitled
- R4: BeOS missing megalomaniacal figurehead to harness and focus developer
- rage
- and it goes like this:
- ----------------------------
- Be Status: Input Acknowledged
- BeOS Version: R3.2
- Component: unknown
- Full Description:
- The BeOS needs a megalomaniacal egomaniac sitting on its throne to give it
- a human character which everyone loves to hate. Without this, the BeOS will
- languish in the impersonifiable realm of OSs that people can never quite
- get a handle on. You can judge the success of an OS not by the quality of
- its features, but by how infamous and disliked the leaders behind them are.
- I believe this is a side-effect of developer comraderie under miserable
- conditions. After all, misery loves company. I believe that making the BeOS
- less conceptually accessible and far less reliable will require developers
- to band together, thus developing the kind of community where strangers
- talk to one- another, kind of like at a grocery store before a huge
- snowstorm.
- Following this same program, it will likely be necessary to move the BeOS
- headquarters to a far-less-comfortable climate. General environmental
- discomfort will breed this attitude within and there truly is no greater
- recipe for success. I would suggest Seattle, but I think it's already
- taken. You might try Washington, DC, but definitely not somewhere like San
- Diego or Tucson.
- ----------------------------
- Unfortunately, the Be bug reporting system strips off the names of the
- people who report the bugs (to protect them from retribution!?) and so I
- don't know who wrote this.
- So it would appear that I'm in the middle of crowing about the technical
- and moral superiority of Debian Linux. But as almost always happens in the
- OS world, it's more complicated than that. I have Windows NT running on
- another machine, and the other day (Jan. 1999), when I had a problem with
- it, I decided to have another go at Microsoft Support. This time the search
- engine actually worked (though in order to reach it I had to identify
- myself as "advanced"). And instead of coughing up some useless FAQ, it
- located about two hundred documents (I was using very vague search
- criteria) that were obviously bug reports--though they were called
- something else. Microsoft, in other words, has got a system up and running
- that is functionally equivalent to Debian's bug database. It looks and
- feels different, of course, but it contains technical nitty-gritty and
- makes no bones about the existence of errors.
- As I've explained, selling OSes for money is a basically untenable
- position, and the only way Apple and Microsoft can get away with it is by
- pursuing technological advancements as aggressively as they can, and by
- getting people to believe in, and to pay for, a particular image: in the
- case of Apple, that of the creative free thinker, and in the case of
- Microsoft, that of the respectable techno-bourgeois. Just like Disney,
- they're making money from selling an interface, a magic mirror. It has to
- be polished and seamless or else the whole illusion is ruined and the
- business plan vanishes like a mirage.
- Accordingly, it was the case until recently that the people who wrote
- manuals and created customer support websites for commercial OSes seemed to
- have been barred, by their employers' legal or PR departments, from
- admitting, even obliquely, that the software might contain bugs or that the
- interface might be suffering from the blinking twelve problem. They
- couldn't address users' actual difficulties. The manuals and websites were
- therefore useless, and caused even technically self-assured users to wonder
- whether they were going subtly insane.
- When Apple engages in this sort of corporate behavior, one wants to believe
- that they are really trying their best. We all want to give Apple the
- benefit of the doubt, because mean old Bill Gates kicked the crap out of
- them, and because they have good PR. But when Microsoft does it, one almost
- cannot help becoming a paranoid conspiracist. Obviously they are hiding
- something from us! And yet they are so powerful! They are trying to drive
- us crazy!
- This approach to dealing with one's customers was straight out of the
- Central European totalitarianism of the mid-Twentieth Century. The
- adjectives "Kafkaesque" and "Orwellian" come to mind. It couldn't last, any
- more than the Berlin Wall could, and so now Microsoft has a publicly
- available bug database. It's called something else, and it takes a while to
- find it, but it's there.
- They have, in other words, adapted to the two-tiered Eloi/Morlock structure
- of technological society. If you're an Eloi you install Windows, follow the
- instructions, hope for the best, and dumbly suffer when it breaks. If
- you're a Morlock you go to the website, tell it that you are "advanced,"
- find the bug database, and get the truth straight from some anonymous
- Microsoft engineer.
- But once Microsoft has taken this step, it raises the question, once again,
- of whether there is any point to being in the OS business at all. Customers
- might be willing to pay $95 to report a problem to Microsoft if, in return,
- they get some advice that no other user is getting. This has the useful
- side effect of keeping the users alienated from one another, which helps
- maintain the illusion that bugs are rare aberrations. But once the results
- of those bug reports become openly available on the Microsoft website,
- everything changes. No one is going to cough up $95 to report a problem
- when chances are good that some other sucker will do it first, and that
- instructions on how to fix the bug will then show up, for free, on a public
- website. And as the size of the bug database grows, it eventually becomes
- an open admission, on Microsoft's part, that their OSes have just as many
- bugs as their competitors'. There is no shame in that; as I mentioned,
- Debian's bug database has logged 32,000 reports so far. But it puts
- Microsoft on an equal footing with the others and makes it a lot harder for
- their customers--who want to believe--to believe.
- MEMENTO MORI
- Once the Linux machine has finished spitting out its jargonic opening
- telegram, it prompts me to log in with a user name and a password. At this
- point the machine is still running the command line interface, with white
- letters on a black screen. There are no windows, menus, or buttons. It does
- not respond to the mouse; it doesn't even know that the mouse is there. It
- is still possible to run a lot of software at this point. Emacs, for
- example, exists in both a CLI and a GUI version (actually there are two GUI
- versions, reflecting some sort of doctrinal schism between Richard Stallman
- and some hackers who got fed up with him). The same is true of many other
- Unix programs. Many don't have a GUI at all, and many that do are capable
- of running from the command line.
- Of course, since my computer only has one monitor screen, I can only see
- one command line, and so you might think that I could only interact with
- one program at a time. But if I hold down the Alt key and then hit the F2
- function button at the top of my keyboard, I am presented with a fresh,
- blank, black screen with a login prompt at the top of it. I can log in here
- and start some other program, then hit Alt-F1 and go back to the first
- screen, which is still doing whatever it was when I left it. Or I can do
- Alt-F3 and log in to a third screen, or a fourth, or a fifth. On one of
- these screens I might be logged in as myself, on another as root (the
- system administrator), on yet another I might be logged on to some other
- computer over the Internet.
- Each of these screens is called, in Unix-speak, a tty, which is an
- abbreviation for teletype. So when I use my Linux system in this way I am
- going right back to that small room at Ames High School where I first wrote
- code twenty-five years ago, except that a tty is quieter and faster than a
- teletype, and capable of running vastly superior software, such as emacs or
- the GNU development tools.
- It is easy (easy by Unix, not Apple/Microsoft standards) to configure a
- Linux machine so that it will go directly into a GUI when you boot it up.
- This way, you never see a tty screen at all. I still have mine boot into
- the white-on-black teletype screen however, as a computational memento
- mori. It used to be fashionable for a writer to keep a human skull on his
- desk as a reminder that he was mortal, that all about him was vanity. The
- tty screen reminds me that the same thing is true of slick user interfaces.
- The X Windows System, which is the GUI of Unix, has to be capable of
- running on hundreds of different video cards with different chipsets,
- amounts of onboard memory, and motherboard buses. Likewise, there are
- hundreds of different types of monitors on the new and used market, each
- with different specifications, and so there are probably upwards of a
- million different possible combinations of card and monitor. The only thing
- they all have in common is that they all work in VGA mode, which is the old
- command-line screen that you see for a few seconds when you launch Windows.
- So Linux always starts in VGA, with a teletype interface, because at first
- it has no idea what sort of hardware is attached to your computer. In order
- to get beyond the glass teletype and into the GUI, you have to tell Linux
- exactly what kinds of hardware you have. If you get it wrong, you'll get a
- blank screen at best, and at worst you might actually destroy your monitor
- by feeding it signals it can't handle.
- When I started using Linux this had to be done by hand. I once spent the
- better part of a month trying to get an oddball monitor to work for me, and
- filled the better part of a composition book with increasingly desperate
- scrawled notes. Nowadays, most Linux distributions ship with a program that
- automatically scans the video card and self-configures the system, so
- getting X Windows up and running is nearly as easy as installing an
- Apple/Microsoft GUI. The crucial information goes into a file (an ASCII
- text file, naturally) called XF86Config, which is worth looking at even if
- your distribution creates it for you automatically. For most people it
- looks like meaningless cryptic incantations, which is the whole point of
- looking at it. An Apple/Microsoft system needs to have the same information
- in order to launch its GUI, but it's apt to be deeply hidden somewhere, and
- it's probably in a file that can't even be opened and read by a text
- editor. All of the important files that make Linux systems work are right
- out in the open. They are always ASCII text files, so you don't need
- special tools to read them. You can look at them any time you want, which
- is good, and you can mess them up and render your system totally
- dysfunctional, which is not so good.
- At any rate, assuming that my XF86Config file is just so, I enter the
- command "startx" to launch the X Windows System. The screen blanks out for
- a minute, the monitor makes strange twitching noises, then reconstitutes
- itself as a blank gray desktop with a mouse cursor in the middle. At the
- same time it is launching a window manager. X Windows is pretty low-level
- software; it provides the infrastructure for a GUI, and it's a heavy
- industrial infrastructure. But it doesn't do windows. That's handled by
- another category of application that sits atop X Windows, called a window
- manager. Several of these are available, all free of course. The classic is
- twm (Tom's Window Manager) but there is a smaller and supposedly more
- efficient variant of it called fvwm, which is what I use. I have my eye on
- a completely different window manager called Enlightenment, which may be
- the hippest single technology product I have ever seen, in that (a) it is
- for Linux, (b) it is freeware, (c) it is being developed by a very small
- number of obsessed hackers, and (d) it looks amazingly cool; it is the sort
- of window manager that might show up in the backdrop of an Aliens movie.
- Anyway, the window manager acts as an intermediary between X Windows and
- whatever software you want to use. It draws the window frames, menus, and
- so on, while the applications themselves draw the actual content in the
- windows. The applications might be of any sort: text editors, Web browsers,
- graphics packages, or utility programs, such as a clock or calculator. In
- other words, from this point on, you feel as if you have been shunted into
- a parallel universe that is quite similar to the familiar Apple or
- Microsoft one, but slightly and pervasively different. The premier graphics
- program under Apple/Microsoft is Adobe Photoshop, but under Linux it's
- something called The GIMP. Instead of the Microsoft Office Suite, you can
- buy something called ApplixWare. Many commercial software packages, such as
- Mathematica, Netscape Communicator, and Adobe Acrobat, are available in
- Linux versions, and depending on how you set up your window manager you can
- make them look and behave just as they would under MacOS or Windows.
- But there is one type of window you'll see on Linux GUI that is rare or
- nonexistent under other OSes. These windows are called "xterm" and contain
- nothing but lines of text--this time, black text on a white background,
- though you can make them be different colors if you choose. Each xterm
- window is a separate command line interface--a tty in a window. So even
- when you are in full GUI mode, you can still talk to your Linux machine
- through a command-line interface.
- There are many good pieces of Unix software that do not have GUIs at all.
- This might be because they were developed before X Windows was available,
- or because the people who wrote them did not want to suffer through all the
- hassle of creating a GUI, or because they simply do not need one. In any
- event, those programs can be invoked by typing their names into the command
- line of an xterm window. The whoami command, mentioned earlier, is a good
- example. There is another called wc ("word count") which simply returns the
- number of lines, words, and characters in a text file.
- The ability to run these little utility programs on the command line is a
- great virtue of Unix, and one that is unlikely to be duplicated by pure GUI
- operating systems. The wc command, for example, is the sort of thing that
- is easy to write with a command line interface. It probably does not
- consist of more than a few lines of code, and a clever programmer could
- probably write it in a single line. In compiled form it takes up just a few
- bytes of disk space. But the code required to give the same program a
- graphical user interface would probably run into hundreds or even thousands
- of lines, depending on how fancy the programmer wanted to make it. Compiled
- into a runnable piece of software, it would have a large overhead of GUI
- code. It would be slow to launch and it would use up a lot of memory. This
- would simply not be worth the effort, and so "wc" would never be written as
- an independent program at all. Instead users would have to wait for a word
- count feature to appear in a commercial software package.
- GUIs tend to impose a large overhead on every single piece of software,
- even the smallest, and this overhead completely changes the programming
- environment. Small utility programs are no longer worth writing. Their
- functions, instead, tend to get swallowed up into omnibus software
- packages. As GUIs get more complex, and impose more and more overhead, this
- tendency becomes more pervasive, and the software packages grow ever more
- colossal; after a point they begin to merge with each other, as Microsoft
- Word and Excel and PowerPoint have merged into Microsoft Office: a
- stupendous software Wal-Mart sitting on the edge of a town filled with tiny
- shops that are all boarded up.
- It is an unfair analogy, because when a tiny shop gets boarded up it means
- that some small shopkeeper has lost his business. Of course nothing of the
- kind happens when "wc" becomes subsumed into one of Microsoft Word's
- countless menu items. The only real drawback is a loss of flexibility for
- the user, but it is a loss that most customers obviously do not notice or
- care about. The most serious drawback to the Wal-Mart approach is that most
- users only want or need a tiny fraction of what is contained in these giant
- software packages. The remainder is clutter, dead weight. And yet the user
- in the next cubicle over will have completely different opinions as to what
- is useful and what isn't.
- The other important thing to mention, here, is that Microsoft has included
- a genuinely cool feature in the Office package: a Basic programming
- package. Basic is the first computer language that I learned, back when I
- was using the paper tape and the teletype. By using the version of Basic
- that comes with Office you can write your own little utility programs that
- know how to interact with all of the little doohickeys, gewgaws, bells, and
- whistles in Office. Basic is easier to use than the languages typically
- employed in Unix command-line programming, and Office has reached many,
- many more people than the GNU tools. And so it is quite possible that this
- feature of Office will, in the end, spawn more hacking than GNU.
- But now I'm talking about application software, not operating systems. And
- as I've said, Microsoft's application software tends to be very good stuff.
- I don't use it very much, because I am nowhere near their target market. If
- Microsoft ever makes a software package that I use and like, then it really
- will be time to dump their stock, because I am a market segment of one.
- GEEK FATIGUE
- Over the years that I've been working with Linux I have filled three and a
- half notebooks logging my experiences. I only begin writing things down
- when I'm doing something complicated, like setting up X Windows or fooling
- around with my Internet connection, and so these notebooks contain only the
- record of my struggles and frustrations. When things are going well for me,
- I'll work along happily for many months without jotting down a single note.
- So these notebooks make for pretty bleak reading. Changing anything under
- Linux is a matter of opening up various of those little ASCII text files
- and changing a word here and a character there, in ways that are extremely
- significant to how the system operates.
- Many of the files that control how Linux operates are nothing more than
- command lines that became so long and complicated that not even Linux
- hackers could type them correctly. When working with something as powerful
- as Linux, you can easily devote a full half-hour to engineering a single
- command line. For example, the "find" command, which searches your file
- system for files that match certain criteria, is fantastically powerful and
- general. Its "man" is eleven pages long, and these are pithy pages; you
- could easily expand them into a whole book. And if that is not complicated
- enough in and of itself, you can always pipe the output of one Unix command
- to the input of another, equally complicated one. The "pon" command, which
- is used to fire up a PPP connection to the Internet, requires so much
- detailed information that it is basically impossible to launch it entirely
- from the command line. Instead you abstract big chunks of its input into
- three or four different files. You need a dialing script, which is
- effectively a little program telling it how to dial the phone and respond
- to various events; an options file, which lists up to about sixty different
- options on how the PPP connection is to be set up; and a secrets file,
- giving information about your password.
- Presumably there are godlike Unix hackers somewhere in the world who don't
- need to use these little scripts and options files as crutches, and who can
- simply pound out fantastically complex command lines without making
- typographical errors and without having to spend hours flipping through
- documentation. But I'm not one of them. Like almost all Linux users, I
- depend on having all of those details hidden away in thousands of little
- ASCII text files, which are in turn wedged into the recesses of the Unix
- filesystem. When I want to change something about the way my system works,
- I edit those files. I know that if I don't keep track of every little
- change I've made, I won't be able to get your system back in working order
- after I've gotten it all messed up. Keeping hand-written logs is tedious,
- not to mention kind of anachronistic. But it's necessary.
- I probably could have saved myself a lot of headaches by doing business
- with a company called Cygnus Support, which exists to provide assistance to
- users of free software. But I didn't, because I wanted to see if I could do
- it myself. The answer turned out to be yes, but just barely. And there are
- many tweaks and optimizations that I could probably make in my system that
- I have never gotten around to attempting, partly because I get tired of
- being a Morlock some days, and partly because I am afraid of fouling up a
- system that generally works well.
- Though Linux works for me and many other users, its sheer power and
- generality is its Achilles' heel. If you know what you are doing, you can
- buy a cheap PC from any computer store, throw away the Windows discs that
- come with it, turn it into a Linux system of mind-boggling complexity and
- power. You can hook it up to twelve other Linux boxes and make it into part
- of a parallel computer. You can configure it so that a hundred different
- people can be logged onto it at once over the Internet, via as many modem
- lines, Ethernet cards, TCP/IP sockets, and packet radio links. You can hang
- half a dozen different monitors off of it and play DOOM with someone in
- Australia while tracking communications satellites in orbit and controlling
- your house's lights and thermostats and streaming live video from your
- web-cam and surfing the Net and designing circuit boards on the other
- screens. But the sheer power and complexity of the system--the qualities
- that make it so vastly technically superior to other OSes--sometimes make
- it seem too formidable for routine day-to-day use.
- Sometimes, in other words, I just want to go to Disneyland.
- The ideal OS for me would be one that had a well-designed GUI that was easy
- to set up and use, but that included terminal windows where I could revert
- to the command line interface, and run GNU software, when it made sense. A
- few years ago, Be Inc. invented exactly that OS. It is called the BeOS.
- ETRE
- Many people in the computer business have had a difficult time grappling
- with Be, Incorporated, for the simple reason that nothing about it seems to
- make any sense whatsoever. It was launched in late 1990, which makes it
- roughly contemporary with Linux. From the beginning it has been devoted to
- creating a new operating system that is, by design, incompatible with all
- the others (though, as we shall see, it is compatible with Unix in some
- very important ways). If a definition of "celebrity" is someone who is
- famous for being famous, then Be is an anti-celebrity. It is famous for not
- being famous; it is famous for being doomed. But it has been doomed for an
- awfully long time.
- Be's mission might make more sense to hackers than to other people. In
- order to explain why I need to explain the concept of cruft, which, to
- people who write code, is nearly as abhorrent as unnecessary repetition.
- If you've been to San Francisco you may have seen older buildings that have
- undergone "seismic upgrades," which frequently means that grotesque
- superstructures of modern steelwork are erected around buildings made in,
- say, a Classical style. When new threats arrive--if we have an Ice Age, for
- example--additional layers of even more high-tech stuff may be constructed,
- in turn, around these, until the original building is like a holy relic in
- a cathedral--a shard of yellowed bone enshrined in half a ton of fancy
- protective junk.
- Analogous measures can be taken to keep creaky old operating systems
- working. It happens all the time. Ditching an worn-out old OS ought to be
- simplified by the fact that, unlike old buildings, OSes have no aesthetic
- or cultural merit that makes them intrinsically worth saving. But it
- doesn't work that way in practice. If you work with a computer, you have
- probably customized your "desktop," the environment in which you sit down
- to work every day, and spent a lot of money on software that works in that
- environment, and devoted much time to familiarizing yourself with how it
- all works. This takes a lot of time, and time is money. As already
- mentioned, the desire to have one's interactions with complex technologies
- simplified through the interface, and to surround yourself with virtual
- tchotchkes and lawn ornaments, is natural and pervasive--presumably a
- reaction against the complexity and formidable abstraction of the computer
- world. Computers give us more choices than we really want. We prefer to
- make those choices once, or accept the defaults handed to us by software
- companies, and let sleeping dogs lie. But when an OS gets changed, all the
- dogs jump up and start barking.
- The average computer user is a technological antiquarian who doesn't really
- like things to change. He or she is like an urban professional who has just
- bought a charming fixer-upper and is now moving the furniture and
- knicknacks around, and reorganizing the kitchen cupboards, so that
- everything's just right. If it is necessary for a bunch of engineers to
- scurry around in the basement shoring up the foundation so that it can
- support the new cast-iron claw-foot bathtub, and snaking new wires and
- pipes through the walls to supply modern appliances, why, so be
- it--engineers are cheap, at least when millions of OS users split the cost
- of their services.
- Likewise, computer users want to have the latest Pentium in their machines,
- and to be able to surf the web, without messing up all the stuff that makes
- them feel as if they know what the hell is going on. Sometimes this is
- actually possible. Adding more RAM to your system is a good example of an
- upgrade that is not likely to screw anything up.
- Alas, very few upgrades are this clean and simple. Lawrence Lessig, the
- whilom Special Master in the Justice Department's antitrust suit against
- Microsoft, complained that he had installed Internet Explorer on his
- computer, and in so doing, lost all of his bookmarks--his personal list of
- signposts that he used to navigate through the maze of the Internet. It was
- as if he'd bought a new set of tires for his car, and then, when pulling
- away from the garage, discovered that, owing to some inscrutable
- side-effect, every signpost and road map in the world had been destroyed.
- If he's like most of us, he had put a lot of work into compiling that list
- of bookmarks. This is only a small taste of the sort of trouble that
- upgrades can cause. Crappy old OSes have value in the basically negative
- sense that changing to new ones makes us wish we'd never been born.
- All of the fixing and patching that engineers must do in order to give us
- the benefits of new technology without forcing us to think about it, or to
- change our ways, produces a lot of code that, over time, turns into a giant
- clot of bubble gum, spackle, baling wire and duct tape surrounding every
- operating system. In the jargon of hackers, it is called "cruft." An
- operating system that has many, many layers of it is described as "crufty."
- Hackers hate to do things twice, but when they see something crufty, their
- first impulse is to rip it out, throw it away, and start anew.
- If Mark Twain were brought back to San Francisco today and dropped into one
- of these old seismically upgraded buildings, it would look just the same to
- him, with all the doors and windows in the same places--but if he stepped
- outside, he wouldn't recognize it. And--if he'd been brought back with his
- wits intact--he might question whether the building had been worth going to
- so much trouble to save. At some point, one must ask the question: is this
- really worth it, or should we maybe just tear it down and put up a good
- one? Should we throw another human wave of structural engineers at
- stabilizing the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or should we just let the damn thing
- fall over and build a tower that doesn't suck?
- Like an upgrade to an old building, cruft always seems like a good idea
- when the first layers of it go on--just routine maintenance, sound prudent
- management. This is especially true if (as it were) you never look into the
- cellar, or behind the drywall. But if you are a hacker who spends all his
- time looking at it from that point of view, cruft is fundamentally
- disgusting, and you can't avoid wanting to go after it with a crowbar. Or,
- better yet, simply walk out of the building--let the Leaning Tower of Pisa
- fall over--and go make a new one THAT DOESN'T LEAN.
- For a long time it was obvious to Apple, Microsoft, and their customers
- that the first generation of GUI operating systems was doomed, and that
- they would eventually need to be ditched and replaced with completely fresh
- ones. During the late Eighties and early Nineties, Apple launched a few
- abortive efforts to make fundamentally new post-Mac OSes such as Pink and
- Taligent. When those efforts failed they launched a new project called
- Copland which also failed. In 1997 they flirted with the idea of acquiring
- Be, but instead they acquired Next, which has an OS called NextStep that
- is, in effect, a variant of Unix. As these efforts went on, and on, and on,
- and failed and failed and failed, Apple's engineers, who were among the
- best in the business, kept layering on the cruft. They were gamely trying
- to turn the little toaster into a multi-tasking, Internet-savvy machine,
- and did an amazingly good job of it for a while--sort of like a movie hero
- running across a jungle river by hopping across crocodiles' backs. But in
- the real world you eventually run out of crocodiles, or step on a really
- smart one.
- Speaking of which, Microsoft tackled the same problem in a considerably
- more orderly way by creating a new OS called Windows NT, which is
- explicitly intended to be a direct competitor of Unix. NT stands for "New
- Technology" which might be read as an explicit rejection of cruft. And
- indeed, NT is reputed to be a lot less crufty than what MacOS eventually
- turned into; at one point the documentation needed to write code on the Mac
- filled something like 24 binders. Windows 95 was, and Windows 98 is, crufty
- because they have to be backward-compatible with older Microsoft OSes.
- Linux deals with the cruft problem in the same way that Eskimos supposedly
- dealt with senior citizens: if you insist on using old versions of Linux
- software, you will sooner or later find yourself drifting through the
- Bering Straits on a dwindling ice floe. They can get away with this because
- most of the software is free, so it costs nothing to download up-to-date
- versions, and because most Linux users are Morlocks.
- The great idea behind BeOS was to start from a clean sheet of paper and
- design an OS the right way. And that is exactly what they did. This was
- obviously a good idea from an aesthetic standpoint, but does not a sound
- business plan make. Some people I know in the GNU/Linux world are annoyed
- with Be for going off on this quixotic adventure when their formidable
- skills could have been put to work helping to promulgate Linux.
- Indeed, none of it makes sense until you remember that the founder of the
- company, Jean-Louis Gassee, is from France--a country that for many years
- maintained its own separate and independent version of the English monarchy
- at a court in St. Germaines, complete with courtiers, coronation
- ceremonies, a state religion and a foreign policy. Now, the same annoying
- yet admirable stiff-neckedness that gave us the Jacobites, the force de
- frappe, Airbus, and ARRET signs in Quebec, has brought us a really cool
- operating system. I fart in your general direction, Anglo-Saxon pig-dogs!
- To create an entirely new OS from scratch, just because none of the
- existing ones was exactly right, struck me as an act of such colossal nerve
- that I felt compelled to support it. I bought a BeBox as soon as I could.
- The BeBox was a dual-processor machine, powered by Motorola chips, made
- specifically to run the BeOS; it could not run any other operating system.
- That's why I bought it. I felt it was a way to burn my bridges. Its most
- distinctive feature is two columns of LEDs on the front panel that zip up
- and down like tachometers to convey a sense of how hard each processor is
- working. I thought it looked cool, and besides, I reckoned that when the
- company went out of business in a few months, my BeBox would be a valuable
- collector's item.
- Now it is about two years later and I am typing this on my BeBox. The LEDs
- (Das Blinkenlights, as they are called in the Be community) flash merrily
- next to my right elbow as I hit the keys. Be, Inc. is still in business,
- though they stopped making BeBoxes almost immediately after I bought mine.
- They made the sad, but probably quite wise decision that hardware was a
- sucker's game, and ported the BeOS to Macintoshes and Mac clones. Since
- these used the same sort of Motorola chips that powered the BeBox, this
- wasn't especially hard.
- Very soon afterwards, Apple strangled the Mac-clone makers and restored its
- hardware monopoly. So, for a while, the only new machines that could run
- BeOS were made by Apple.
- By this point Be, like Spiderman with his Spider-sense, had developed a
- keen sense of when they were about to get crushed like a bug. Even if they
- hadn't, the notion of being dependent on Apple--so frail and yet so
- vicious--for their continued existence should have put a fright into
- anyone. Now engaged in their own crocodile-hopping adventure, they ported
- the BeOS to Intel chips--the same chips used in Windows machines. And not a
- moment too soon, for when Apple came out with its new top-of-the-line
- hardware, based on the Motorola G3 chip, they withheld the technical data
- that Be's engineers would need to make the BeOS run on those machines. This
- would have killed Be, just like a slug between the eyes, if they hadn't
- made the jump to Intel.
- So now BeOS runs on an assortment of hardware that is almost incredibly
- motley: BeBoxes, aging Macs and Mac orphan-clones, and Intel machines that
- are intended to be used for Windows. Of course the latter type are
- ubiquitous and shockingly cheap nowadays, so it would appear that Be's
- hardware troubles are finally over. Some German hackers have even come up
- with a Das Blinkenlights replacement: it's a circuit board kit that you can
- plug into PC-compatible machines running BeOS. It gives you the zooming LED
- tachometers that were such a popular feature of the BeBox.
- My BeBox is already showing its age, as all computers do after a couple of
- years, and sooner or later I'll probably have to replace it with an Intel
- machine. Even after that, though, I will still be able to use it. Because,
- inevitably, someone has now ported Linux to the BeBox.
- At any rate, BeOS has an extremely well-thought-out GUI built on a
- technological framework that is solid. It is based from the ground up on
- modern object-oriented software principles. BeOS software consists of
- quasi-independent software entities called objects, which communicate by
- sending messages to each other. The OS itself is made up of such objects,
- and serves as a kind of post office or Internet that routes messages to and
- fro, from object to object. The OS is multi-threaded, which means that like
- all other modern OSes it can walk and chew gum at the same time; but it
- gives programmers a lot of power over spawning and terminating threads, or
- independent sub-processes. It is also a multi-processing OS, which means
- that it is inherently good at running on computers that have more than one
- CPU (Linux and Windows NT can also do this proficiently).
- For this user, a big selling point of BeOS is the built-in Terminal
- application, which enables you to open up windows that are equivalent to
- the xterm windows in Linux. In other words, the command line interface is
- available if you want it. And because BeOS hews to a certain standard
- called POSIX, it is capable of running most of the GNU software. That is to
- say that the vast array of command-line software developed by the GNU crowd
- will work in BeOS terminal windows without complaint. This includes the GNU
- development tools-the compiler and linker. And it includes all of the handy
- little utility programs. I'm writing this using a modern sort of
- user-friendly text editor called Pe, written by a Dutchman named Maarten
- Hekkelman, but when I want to find out how long it is, I jump to a terminal
- window and run "wc."
- As is suggested by the sample bug report I quoted earlier, people who work
- for Be, and developers who write code for BeOS, seem to be enjoying
- themselves more than their counterparts in other OSes. They also seem to be
- a more diverse lot in general. A couple of years ago I went to an
- auditorium at a local university to see some representatives of Be put on a
- dog-and-pony show. I went because I assumed that the place would be empty
- and echoing, and I felt that they deserved an audience of at least one. In
- fact, I ended up standing in an aisle, for hundreds of students had packed
- the place. It was like a rock concert. One of the two Be engineers on the
- stage was a black man, which unfortunately is a very odd thing in the
- high-tech world. The other made a ringing denunciation of cruft, and
- extolled BeOS for its cruft-free qualities, and actually came out and said
- that in ten or fifteen years, when BeOS had become all crufty like MacOS
- and Windows 95, it would be time to simply throw it away and create a new
- OS from scratch. I doubt that this is an official Be, Inc. policy, but it
- sure made a big impression on everyone in the room! During the late
- Eighties, the MacOS was, for a time, the OS of cool people-artists and
- creative-minded hackers-and BeOS seems to have the potential to attract the
- same crowd now. Be mailing lists are crowded with hackers with names like
- Vladimir and Olaf and Pierre, sending flames to each other in fractured
- techno-English.
- The only real question about BeOS is whether or not it is doomed.
- Of late, Be has responded to the tiresome accusation that they are doomed
- with the assertion that BeOS is "a media operating system" made for media
- content creators, and hence is not really in competition with Windows at
- all. This is a little bit disingenuous. To go back to the car dealership
- analogy, it is like the Batmobile dealer claiming that he is not really in
- competition with the others because his car can go three times as fast as
- theirs and is also capable of flying.
- Be has an office in Paris, and, as mentioned, the conversation on Be
- mailing lists has a strongly European flavor. At the same time they have
- made strenuous efforts to find a niche in Japan, and Hitachi has recently
- begun bundling BeOS with their PCs. So if I had to make wild guess I'd say
- that they are playing Go while Microsoft is playing chess. They are staying
- clear, for now, of Microsoft's overwhelmingly strong position in North
- America. They are trying to get themselves established around the edges of
- the board, as it were, in Europe and Japan, where people may be more open
- to alternative OSes, or at least more hostile to Microsoft, than they are
- in the United States.
- What holds Be back in this country is that the smart people are afraid to
- look like suckers. You run the risk of looking naive when you say "I've
- tried the BeOS and here's what I think of it." It seems much more
- sophisticated to say "Be's chances of carving out a new niche in the highly
- competitive OS market are close to nil."
- It is, in techno-speak, a problem of mindshare. And in the OS business,
- mindshare is more than just a PR issue; it has direct effects on the
- technology itself. All of the peripheral gizmos that can be hung off of a
- personal computer--the printers, scanners, PalmPilot interfaces, and Lego
- Mindstorms--require pieces of software called drivers. Likewise, video
- cards and (to a lesser extent) monitors need drivers. Even the different
- types of motherboards on the market relate to the OS in different ways, and
- separate code is required for each one. All of this hardware-specific code
- must not only written but also tested, debugged, upgraded, maintained, and
- supported. Because the hardware market has become so vast and complicated,
- what really determines an OS's fate is not how good the OS is technically,
- or how much it costs, but rather the availability of hardware-specific
- code. Linux hackers have to write that code themselves, and they have done
- an amazingly good job of keeping up to speed. Be, Inc. has to write all
- their own drivers, though as BeOS has begun gathering momentum, third-party
- developers have begun to contribute drivers, which are available on Be's
- web site.
- But Microsoft owns the high ground at the moment, because it doesn't have
- to write its own drivers. Any hardware maker bringing a new video card or
- peripheral device to market today knows that it will be unsalable unless it
- comes with the hardware-specific code that will make it work under Windows,
- and so each hardware maker has accepted the burden of creating and
- maintaining its own library of drivers.
- MINDSHARE
- The U.S. Government's assertion that Microsoft has a monopoly in the OS
- market might be the most patently absurd claim ever advanced by the legal
- mind. Linux, a technically superior operating system, is being given away
- for free, and BeOS is available at a nominal price. This is simply a fact,
- which has to be accepted whether or not you like Microsoft.
- Microsoft is really big and rich, and if some of the government's witnesses
- are to be believed, they are not nice guys. But the accusation of a
- monopoly simply does not make any sense.
- What is really going on is that Microsoft has seized, for the time being, a
- certain type of high ground: they dominate in the competition for
- mindshare, and so any hardware or software maker who wants to be taken
- seriously feels compelled to make a product that is compatible with their
- operating systems. Since Windows-compatible drivers get written by the
- hardware makers, Microsoft doesn't have to write them; in effect, the
- hardware makers are adding new components to Windows, making it a more
- capable OS, without charging Microsoft for the service. It is a very good
- position to be in. The only way to fight such an opponent is to have an
- army of highly competetent coders who write equivalent drivers for free,
- which Linux does.
- But possession of this psychological high ground is different from a
- monopoly in any normal sense of that word, because here the dominance has
- nothing to do with technical performance or price. The old robber-baron
- monopolies were monopolies because they physically controlled means of
- production and/or distribution. But in the software business, the means of
- production is hackers typing code, and the means of distribution is the
- Internet, and no one is claiming that Microsoft controls those.
- Here, instead, the dominance is inside the minds of people who buy
- software. Microsoft has power because people believe it does. This power is
- very real. It makes lots of money. Judging from recent legal proceedings in
- both Washingtons, it would appear that this power and this money have
- inspired some very peculiar executives to come out and work for Microsoft,
- and that Bill Gates should have administered saliva tests to some of them
- before issuing them Microsoft ID cards.
- But this is not the sort of power that fits any normal definition of the
- word "monopoly," and it's not amenable to a legal fix. The courts may order
- Microsoft to do things differently. They might even split the company up.
- But they can't really do anything about a mindshare monopoly, short of
- taking every man, woman, and child in the developed world and subjecting
- them to a lengthy brainwashing procedure.
- Mindshare dominance is, in other words, a really odd sort of beast,
- something that the framers of our antitrust laws couldn't possibly have
- imagined. It looks like one of these modern, wacky chaos-theory phenomena,
- a complexity thing, in which a whole lot of independent but connected
- entities (the world's computer users), making decisions on their own,
- according to a few simple rules of thumb, generate a large phenomenon
- (total domination of the market by one company) that cannot be made sense
- of through any kind of rational analysis. Such phenomena are fraught with
- concealed tipping-points and all a-tangle with bizarre feedback loops, and
- cannot be understood; people who try, end up (a) going crazy, (b) giving
- up, (c) forming crackpot theories, or (d) becoming high-paid chaos theory
- consultants.
- Now, there might be one or two people at Microsoft who are dense enough to
- believe that mindshare dominance is some kind of stable and enduring
- position. Maybe that even accounts for some of the weirdos they've hired in
- the pure-business end of the operation, the zealots who keep getting hauled
- into court by enraged judges. But most of them must have the wit to
- understand that phenomena like these are maddeningly unstable, and that
- there's no telling what weird, seemingly inconsequential event might cause
- the system to shift into a radically different configuration.
- To put it another way, Microsoft can be confident that Thomas Penfield
- Jackson will not hand down an order that the brains of everyone in the
- developed world are to be summarily re-programmed. But there's no way to
- predict when people will decide, en masse, to re-program their own brains.
- This might explain some of Microsoft's behavior, such as their policy of
- keeping eerily large reserves of cash sitting around, and the extreme
- anxiety that they display whenever something like Java comes along.
- I have never seen the inside of the building at Microsoft where the top
- executives hang out, but I have this fantasy that in the hallways, at
- regular intervals, big red alarm boxes are bolted to the wall. Each
- contains a large red button protected by a windowpane. A metal hammer
- dangles on a chain next to it. Above is a big sign reading: IN THE EVENT OF
- A CRASH IN MARKET SHARE, BREAK GLASS.
- What happens when someone shatters the glass and hits the button, I don't
- know, but it sure would be interesting to find out. One imagines banks
- collapsing all over the world as Microsoft withdraws its cash reserves, and
- shrink-wrapped pallet-loads of hundred-dollar bills dropping from the
- skies. No doubt, Microsoft has a plan. But what I would really like to know
- is whether, at some level, their programmers might heave a big sigh of
- relief if the burden of writing the One Universal Interface to Everything
- were suddenly lifted from their shoulders.
- THE RIGHT PINKY OF GOD
- In his book The Life of the Cosmos, which everyone should read, Lee Smolin
- gives the best description I've ever read of how our universe emerged from
- an uncannily precise balancing of different fundamental constants. The mass
- of the proton, the strength of gravity, the range of the weak nuclear
- force, and a few dozen other fundamental constants completely determine
- what sort of universe will emerge from a Big Bang. If these values had been
- even slightly different, the universe would have been a vast ocean of tepid
- gas or a hot knot of plasma or some other basically uninteresting thing--a
- dud, in other words. The only way to get a universe that's not a dud--that
- has stars, heavy elements, planets, and life--is to get the basic numbers
- just right. If there were some machine, somewhere, that could spit out
- universes with randomly chosen values for their fundamental constants, then
- for every universe like ours it would produce 10^229 duds.
- Though I haven't sat down and run the numbers on it, to me this seems
- comparable to the probability of making a Unix computer do something useful
- by logging into a tty and typing in command lines when you have forgotten
- all of the little options and keywords. Every time your right pinky slams
- that ENTER key, you are making another try. In some cases the operating
- system does nothing. In other cases it wipes out all of your files. In most
- cases it just gives you an error message. In other words, you get many
- duds. But sometimes, if you have it all just right, the computer grinds
- away for a while and then produces something like emacs. It actually
- generates complexity, which is Smolin's criterion for interestingness.
- Not only that, but it's beginning to look as if, once you get below a
- certain size--way below the level of quarks, down into the realm of string
- theory--the universe can't be described very well by physics as it has been
- practiced since the days of Newton. If you look at a small enough scale,
- you see processes that look almost computational in nature.
- I think that the message is very clear here: somewhere outside of and
- beyond our universe is an operating system, coded up over incalculable
- spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge. The cosmic operating system
- uses a command-line interface. It runs on something like a teletype, with
- lots of noise and heat; punched-out bits flutter down into its hopper like
- drifting stars. The demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command
- line after another, specifying the values of fundamental constants of
- physics:
- universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34 -protonmass 1.673e-27....
- and when he's finished typing out the command line, his right pinky
- hesitates above the ENTER key for an aeon or two, wondering what's going to
- happen; then down it comes--and the WHACK you hear is another Big Bang.
- Now THAT is a cool operating system, and if such a thing were actually made
- available on the Internet (for free, of course) every hacker in the world
- would download it right away and then stay up all night long messing with
- it, spitting out universes right and left. Most of them would be pretty
- dull universes but some of them would be simply amazing. Because what those
- hackers would be aiming for would be much more ambitious than a universe
- that had a few stars and galaxies in it. Any run-of-the-mill hacker would
- be able to do that. No, the way to gain a towering reputation on the
- Internet would be to get so good at tweaking your command line that your
- universes would spontaneously develop life. And once the way to do that
- became common knowledge, those hackers would move on, trying to make their
- universes develop the right kind of life, trying to find the one change in
- the Nth decimal place of some physical constant that would give us an Earth
- in which, say, Hitler had been accepted into art school after all, and had
- ended up his days as a street artist with cranky political opinions.
- Even if that fantasy came true, though, most users (including myself, on
- certain days) wouldn't want to bother learning to use all of those arcane
- commands, and struggling with all of the failures; a few dud universes can
- really clutter up your basement. After we'd spent a while pounding out
- command lines and hitting that ENTER key and spawning dull, failed
- universes, we would start to long for an OS that would go all the way to
- the opposite extreme: an OS that had the power to do everything--to live
- our life for us. In this OS, all of the possible decisions we could ever
- want to make would have been anticipated by clever programmers, and
- condensed into a series of dialog boxes. By clicking on radio buttons we
- could choose from among mutually exclusive choices
- (HETEROSEXUAL/HOMOSEXUAL). Columns of check boxes would enable us to select
- the things that we wanted in our life (GET MARRIED/WRITE GREAT AMERICAN
- NOVEL) and for more complicated options we could fill in little text boxes
- (NUMBER OF DAUGHTERS: NUMBER OF SONS:).
- Even this user interface would begin to look awfully complicated after a
- while, with so many choices, and so many hidden interactions between
- choices. It could become damn near unmanageable--the blinking twelve
- problem all over again. The people who brought us this operating system
- would have to provide templates and wizards, giving us a few default lives
- that we could use as starting places for designing our own. Chances are
- that these default lives would actually look pretty damn good to most
- people, good enough, anyway, that they'd be reluctant to tear them open and
- mess around with them for fear of making them worse. So after a few
- releases the software would begin to look even simpler: you would boot it
- up and it would present you with a dialog box with a single large button in
- the middle labeled: LIVE. Once you had clicked that button, your life would
- begin. If anything got out of whack, or failed to meet your expectations,
- you could complain about it to Microsoft's Customer Support Department. If
- you got a flack on the line, he or she would tell you that your life was
- actually fine, that there was not a thing wrong with it, and in any event
- it would be a lot better after the next upgrade was rolled out. But if you
- persisted, and identified yourself as Advanced, you might get through to an
- actual engineer.
- What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem, and
- enumerated all of the dissatisfactions in your life? He would probably tell
- you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can
- change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if
- you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your
- own.
- Copyright 1999 by Neal Stephenson
- 1999 The Hearst Corporation
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