17 ms·

In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

412 points by conanxin 2y ago

mxwsn 2y ago
This essay by Neal Stephenson was first published in 1999. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Command_Line https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_... The analogy of OS as cars (Windows is a station wagon, Linux is a tank) is brought up in the recent Acquired episode on Microsoft, where Vista was a Dodge Viper but Windows 7 was a Toyota Camry, which is what users actually wanted.
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
  Windows XP would probably be an old 1970s Volvo that is still, somehow, running in all kinds of places otherwise forgotten by the waking world.
  - homarp 2y ago
    like https://www.osnews.com/story/140301/no-southwest-airlines-is-not-still-using-windows-3-1/ https://www.osnews.com/story/140301/no-southwest-airlines-is... :)
  - heraldgeezer 2y ago
    OS/2 also! :D
  - johnohara 2y ago
    Mostly in Oregon, Northern CA, and parts of Washington. But parts are increasingly hard to find.
    - CRConrad 2y ago
      Mostly in all of Sweden, all of Finland, probably still quite a lot in Denmark, but perhaps not so many in Norway any more (since they are rapidly electrifying[1] the entire national car fleet). ___ [1]: Ironically, the heavy state subsidies for buying an electric car are, like anything else in Norway, financed by... Oil money.
- GrumpyYoungMan 2y ago
  And Neal Stephenson acknowledged it was obsolete in 2004: "I embraced OS X as soon as it was available and have never looked back. So a lot of 'In the beginning was the command line' is now obsolete. I keep meaning to update it, but if I'm honest with myself, I have to say this is unlikely." https://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-responds-with-wit-and-humor https://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-... But people still dredge this quarter century old apocrypha up and use it to pat themselves on the back for being Linux users. "I use a Hole Hawg! I drive a tank! I'm not like those other fellows because I'm a real hacker!"
  - Phiwise_ 2y ago
    "Obsolete" is too strong a word, I think. OSX isn't an evolution of the Macintosh's operating system; That'd be Pink, which was even mentioned, and it crashed and burned. OSX was far closer to a Linux box and a Mac box on the same desk, therefore the only change really needed is to replace mentions of Unix or specifically Linux with Linux/OSX as far as the points of the piece are concerned. If Jobs had paid Torvalds to call OSX "Apple Linux" (Or maybe just called it Apple Berkeley Unix) for some reason this would be moot. I also primarily use Windows and don't have a dog in the fight you mentioned. I might actually dislike Linux more than OSX, though it has been quite a while since I've seriously used the one-button OS.
    - wpm 2y ago
      macOS shares zero lineage with Linux, which itself shares zero lineage with the UNIX derivatives. It would make zero sense for Apple to call macOS "Apple Linux" when it doesn't use the Linux kernel. Mac OS X is closest to a NeXTStep box with a coat of Mac-like polish on top. Even calling it "Apple Berkeley Unix" wouldn't make sense, because the XNU kernel is a mish mash of both BSD 4.3 and the Mach kernel. Linux and the UNIX derivates are not even cousins. Not related. Not even the same species. They just both look like crabs a la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation.
      - 13of40 2y ago
- simonmysun 2y ago
  I feel now the different way. Linux is never that much more powerful than other OS. It felt more like a tractor 10 years ago and now it is a good alternative to "Toyota Camry" with pretty good user experience. Meanwhile Windows has become those cars with two 27" screen as dashboard, which has bad user experience and full of advertisements.
- davidgerard 2y ago
  The actual comparison is that Vista was the Ford Edsel (hilarious and widely-mocked failure) but 7 was the Ford Comet (a huge hit). It's a close analogy, because the Comet was actually the next model of Edsel. They just changed the branding. Same with Vista to 7.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- justin66 2y ago
  > recent Acquired episode on Microsoft, where Vista was a Dodge Viper but Windows 7 was a Toyota Camry, which is what users actually wanted. I assume if anyone associated with Microsoft compared Vista to anything other than an abject failure, it's because they are - at best - broken or defective people who were involved in the creation of Vista, and therefore not objective and not to be trusted in any way. Dodge Viper? WTF?
  - throwawaydummy 2y ago
    Doge Vipers get a bad rep even in need for speed lol but idk enough about cars to know why
    - 00N8 2y ago
      The first generation or two of Vipers were very raw & unrefined, with ~400 horsepower, no stability control, no anti-lock brakes, minimal safety features, cheap & janky looking interiors, etc. It sounds great to me (aside from the lack of a/c & nice ergonomic interior), but it would be extremely easy to have a bad time if you're an average driver. I'm not sure about the analogy though, they might have been thinking of later Viper versions where the complaints would be more about cost, gas mileage, or general impracticality for daily use.
    - jholman 2y ago
      This might help? https://youtu.be/WdtK9Sj8ADw?list=PLoTU9_iCGa6go3vsnxlNn1wZSZo7jvGUG&t=142 https://youtu.be/WdtK9Sj8ADw?list=PLoTU9_iCGa6go3vsnxlNn1wZS...
- throwawaydummy 2y ago
  I didn’t know myself let alone computers but anyone know why Vista and Windows 8 got such bad reps?
  - smackeyacky 2y ago
    They were given “tablet friendly” user interfaces that made navigation extremely difficult. But Microsoft never finished the job so you’d try to find something in the stupid sliding screen interface only to be thrown into a windows 3.1 era control panel. Windows server of that era was even worse, as mostly you administered using RDP but it never played nice with the “hover here to bring up the whole screen menu” required to drive it. Underneath it was just Windows, but the interface ruined it
  - theandrewbailey 2y ago
    I'm one of the few people who thought Vista was fine. It mostly got a bad rap because of bad drivers and high system requirements.
  - thfuran 2y ago
    Vista significantly changed the security model, introducing UAC and requiring driver signing. This caused a bunch of turmoil. It also had much higher system requirements than xp for decent performance, meaning that it ran at least a bit shit on many people's machines when it was new, and that did it no favors.
- bitwize 2y ago
  The way I explained my continued loathing of Microsoft to a friend was that back in the day, it was like having two choices of car: a Ford Pinto, or a pickup truck. Not everybody needed the heavy transport capabilities of the pickup, but their only choice if they didn't want the added bulk and fuel consumption was the Pinto, which had dangerous failure modes. Later, the Pinto would be withdrawn and replaced with a Ford Taurus, a serviceable but not particularly fun or performant vehicle which worked fine usually, but was based on a transaxle design, so when it did break you had to dismantle the entire front end of the vehicle in order to repair it. And now imagine that there were roads you couldn't drive on and places you couldn't go unless you had one of these three vehicles, simply due to Ford's market pressure on infrastructure planners, not for any good reason; and besides, people mocked you for wanting something else.
yetihehe 2y ago
My favourite part explaining how unix/linux users feel regarding windows: 'THE HOLE HAWG OF OPERATING SYSTEMS'. This essay should be a mandatory reading for all CS students and anyone wanting to call himself hacker.
- raldi 2y ago
  Yes, and the part about Reagan.
- chuchurocka 2y ago
  I teach data analytics and it’s required reading on the first week. It doesn’t soften the blow of throwing people in the CLI but provides perspective to why I am.
  - askvictor 2y ago
    Just tell them it's the 'chat interface' to the computer.
hgyjnbdet 2y ago
Me: seems like my sort of thing. Me: navigate to linked website, see wall of text. Me: clicks reading mode Me: *193 - 245 minutes* Me: bookmark to read later; probably not
- yetihehe 2y ago
  It's very engaging, please try reading it.
- sshine 2y ago
  It’s a short novel. Putting it in a browser window gives it bad odds. You can also listen to it: https://youtu.be/KpaUg6WwdzU https://youtu.be/KpaUg6WwdzU Begins at 01:30, 25 minutes.
  - boomskats 2y ago
    > 25 minutes That link is only part 1 (of 7). It's still around 2 and a bit hours of listening in total. https://www.youtube.com/@robertreads4323/videos https://www.youtube.com/@robertreads4323/videos
    - sshine 2y ago
      Thanks for correcting me.
      - boomskats 2y ago
        Thanks for the link! I'm 3/7ths of the way through it.
- enugu 2y ago
  You can skip ahead to his playful thesis > the universe emerging from the command line. 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.
inciampati 2y ago
I read this during my university graduation ceremonies. It was hidden in a fold in my robes. It was the most fitting thing I could have done, as I immediately changed my life direction and focused on exactly the ideas outlined in this work. My goal: move the world from the command line. I've almost managed to.
- throwaway211 2y ago
  I like the problem to the move away from IP Chains. We should move to the Command Table.
kkfx 2y ago
To be (re)read together with the Unix Haters Handbook https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf to realize that what we need is re-made LispM, Smalltalk workstations or the OS as a single application, framework opened down to the most low level part, in the user hands, fully end-user programmable, discoverable, and fully integrated. A 2D and even 3D/4D CLI as the UI, witch is the DocUIs with eventual 3D and video/multimedia elements. As a conceptual framework http://augmentingcognition.com/assets/Kay1977.pdf http://augmentingcognition.com/assets/Kay1977.pdf
- lproven 2y ago
  Riotous applause from the cheap seats
  - kkfx 2y ago
    Thanks :-) but allow me to enlarge, in my poor English: "us" the westerns, we came from those who invented the IT, the modern industry. We are evidently in a declining phase. Evidently someone else try to emerge and actually one of the most prominent new power, China, emerge doing what we have done when we was at the top of the world in industrial, public research, education terms. Meaning such "technical model" works. Evidently the financial capitalism have worked for a certain period but does not work anymore. So, why keeping committing suicide? We have started to suicide with the WWI. We kept going with WWII and we continue now. We are still the leader for IT, and we know what does it work, the classic FLOSS/at least open IT model, the one where some sell iron not bits, the one where customers own their systems and bend them as they wish, the one where communication is not owned by some walled gardens but open like on Usenet, classic mails (as opposite to webmails, hiding the decentralized ability for most users who do not own the WebMUA). To continue with the China comparison I've recently bought some battery tools, very cheap crap but enough for domestic usage and I've observed that batteries have a standard connector, I can swap them from different brands issueless, batteries, chargers are "standard". I also own some high end domestic battery tools, who happen to have a damn nfc tag inside the battery tying it to the device, even if inside the battery are classic connected li-ion batteries. The same I observed for BEV, some friends and I have three Chinese BEV from different brands/models and they have a gazillion of common parts. So to say "open/standard pay back" yes, it might erode SOME OEMs margins, but pay back the society at a whole and as a result the OEM itself. The same is valid in software terms. My desktop is Emacs/EXWM, I use as a search&narrow framework consult/orderless/vertico, they simply "plug in" any other packages because the system is a unique application end-user programmable at runtime. You do not need to "specifically support" a package to integrate it. You do not need third party to explicitly support your package to use it together. And what we do instead? Our best to create walled gardens, we have had XMPP, SIP/RTP and now most are on Zoom/Teams/Meet/Slack/Skype/* all walled gardens. Even many push to substitute emails with some new colorful walled garden. Similarly any app try to add features someone else have since it's impossible just using it, like a sexp in a buffer. As a result modern IT from Unix where the user at least can combine simple tools with some IPCs in script we are limited by cut&paste, drag&drop and not much more. Anything is damn complicated because there are no shared data structure in a shared environment, but any "app" do everything on it's own, often with a gazillion of dependencies who have a gazillion of deps on their own, with a big load of parsers of any kind and even "some standard to pass data" (like JSON) who try to emerge but are still not a shared data structure in an unique integrated environment. All of this is the old Greenspun's tenth rule and actually is killing our IT innovation, killing one of the last sector we still rules, for the same issues that have killed our industry essentially.
mg 2y ago
The command line is still king. Whenever I see new coders struggle, it usually is because they: - Don't know the context of what they are executing - Don't know about the concept of input and output On the command line, the context is obvious. You are in the context. The working dir, the environment, everything is the same for you as it is for the thing you execute via ./mything.py. Input and output are also obvious. Input is what you type, output is what you see. Using pipes to redirect it comes naturally. Not being natively connected to context, input and output is often at the core of problems I see even senior programmers struggle with.
- pavlov 2y ago
  This is such generic advice about computing, it’s like saying: “To make a building, you need to have a foundation, something to keep the roof up, and a way for people to move inside.”
  - mg 2y ago
    The analogy I would make is that living in the command line is like using a CAD program while living in IDEs is like using CorelDraw to design houses. CorelDraw feels more efficient because one quickly has what looks like a beautiful, colorful house on the screen. And then one does not understand why the doors don't work correctly.
- dakiol 2y ago
  The more experience I accumulate, the more I rely on GUIs. Explanation: when I was younger I used exclusively the CLI and underestimated GUIs. Now I tend to appreciate GUIs and use them more.
  - lucianbr 2y ago
    If you're experienced with the command line, it's easy to use GUIs and get good results. If one starts with GUIs and doesn't really understand what is behind, then all kinds of trouble happen. So I guess, as with any tool, understanding is key.
KingOfCoders 2y ago
In the beginning was a switch.
deleted 2y ago
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xg15 2y ago
> 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!" Did Linux distros actually offer support at some point? (By what I assume would be some project contributor ssh-ing into your machine) My impression was always the arguments were more like "Well yes, but we have this literal building full of technical manuals that describe every bolt and screw of your tank - and we can give you a copy of all of them for free! And think about it - after you have taken some modest effort to read and learn all of them by heart, you'll be able to fix and even modify your tank all on your own! No more dependence on crooked car dealers! And if you need help, we have monthly community meetups you can attend and talk with people just as tank-crazy as you are! (please only attend if you're sufficiently tank-crazy, and PLEASE only after you read the manuals)" (This was decades ago, the situation has gotten significantly better today)
- delusional 2y ago
  > Did Linux distros actually offer support at some point? (By what I assume would be some project contributor ssh-ing into your machine) I don't think that was the intended implication. I think the analogy is more akin to: "If send us a bug report, we'll fix it and ship a new version that you can download and use for free." In the olden days, you'd have to buy a new version of commercial software if it didn't work for your machine, complementary patches were rare.
  - jmclnx 2y ago
    Depends on where you lived. In the early days there were lots of LUGs in some areas, usually in college areas, but some would be hosted at a few Companies. I think DEC had one or two. And you could find someone who would meet you somewhere to help you out, it was an exciting time. Also there were lots of install fests for Linux. Most activity took place on USENET, so getting help was rather easy. For example, I had asked how I could connect 2 monitors to my 386SX, one controlled by a VGA card, the other via a mono-card, each monitor with a couple of VTs. That was doable with Coherent on install. A day later I got a patch. Things moved very quickly back then :)
willguest 2y ago
Shouldn't this be written in Latin?
- layer8 2y ago
  Hebrew, you mean?
qubex 2y ago
I’ve got this in soft-cover. I think I read it back before the turn of the millennium. As a BeOS aficionado I loved the reference to batmobiles.
danielovichdk 2y ago
Yes. Cults are real. At the same time very telling. Some people really believe they are better because they have a different machine than someone else. And that shit runs deep.
marmot777 2y ago
Because I had to read this before falling asleep I had audio going out 2x so it sounds like a fifties cartoon.
deleted 2y ago
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nonrandomstring 2y ago
For if your browser isn't okay with the long lines; wget -O - https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt | nroff | less
- sschober 2y ago
  I love that you can do that with the text.
pavlov 2y ago
The CLI has a massive blind spot in today’s operating systems: it knows nothing useful about events. Yet events are the primary way anything happens on a computer, whether it’s a user system or a server.
- fock 2y ago
  huh? DBUS is very much a thing and has CLI-tooling?
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  Annoying though it may be, you can run a program in the background that can write to your open terminal. Just in userspace you have; dmesg -w tail -f /var/log/messages There's also dbus to monitor on Linux systems and a lot of kernel hook tricks you can use to get a message pop up if an event happens. Because it gets annoying to have a process splurge notification stuff to a term you are working in, that's why you have info-bars which many terminal emulators support.
- skydhash 2y ago
  In unix world, everything is a file, so you can poll the file waiting for something to happen. And there’s the whole signal thing and dbus exists.
  - pavlov 2y ago
    Yeah, these are the event paradigms that I meant by “nothing useful.” Files are not a good abstraction for events. Signals are broken in many ways. And DBus is both extremely clunky to use and non-portable. There isn’t a built-in event paradigm similar to how streams and pipes are an integral part of the Unix-style CLI.
    - dandanua 2y ago
      > Files are not a good abstraction for events Why is that? On the low level everything is a state of electronic cells. Files address those cells in a suitable fashion. Modern programming abstractions such as async/await are very simple, but fail miserably if you need something really complex and efficient.
ryandv 2y ago
The section on "THE INTERFACE CULTURE" is critical to understand in today's digital media landscape. Disney's Animal Kingdom is to the written works of Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie as the GUI is to the command-line interface. The message of one medium is audiovisual spectacle and immersive experience; the other, cold intellectualism demanding participation from the reader to paint a picture in his mind's eye through the interpretation of raw text, words on a screen, or a piece of paper. But this is precisely the same as what is lost in the transition from the command-line interface to the GUI. 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? 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. Elsewhere [0] I have called this concept "post-literacy," and this theme pervades much of Stephenson's work - highly technologically advanced societies outfitted with molecular assemblers and metaverses, populated by illiterate masses who mostly get by through the use of pictographs and hieroglyphic languages (emoji, anyone?). Literacy is for the monks who, cloistered away in their monasteries, still scribble ink scratchings on dead trees and ponder "useless" philosophical quandaries. The structure of modern audiovisual media lends itself to the immediate application of implicit bias. On IRC, in the days of 56k before bandwidth and computer networks had developed to the point of being able to deliver low-latency, high definition audio and video, perhaps even for "real-time" videoconferencing, most of your interactions with others online was mediated through the written word. Nowhere here, unless some party chooses to disclose it, do race, gender, accent, physical appearance, or otherwise, enter into the picture and possibly cloud your judgment of who a person is - or, more importantly, the weight of their words, and whether or not they are correct, or at least insightful; consider Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" paper which first introduced what is now called the "Turing test," and how it was designed to be conducted purely over textual media as a written conversation, so as to avoid influencing through other channels the interrogator's judgment of who is the man, and who is the machine. 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. Moreover, the confusion of symbols for reality, the precession of digitized, audiovisual content from a mere representation to more-than-real, digital hyperreality (since truth and God are all dead and everything is merely a consensual societal hallucination), leads people to mistake pixels on a screen for actual objects; narrative and spin for truth; influencers, videos, and YouTube personalities for actual people; or words from ChatGPT as real wisdom and insight - much in the same way that Searle's so-called "Chinese room" masquerades as an actual native speaker of Mandarin or Cantonese: "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." 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. It simply is the case that we are way too busy, nowadays, to comprehend everything in detail. The structure of modern short-form, upvote-driven media, lends itself to the production of short-form messages and takes with laughably small upper bounds on the amount of information they can contain. In a manner reminiscent of "you are what you eat," you think similarly to the forms of media you consume - and one who consumes primarily short-form media will produce short-form thoughts bereft of nuance and critical thinking, and additionally suffer from all the deficits in attention span we have heard of as the next braindead 10-second short or reel robs you of your concentration, and the next, and the next... Beyond the infectious slot machine-like dopamine gratification of the pull-to-refresh and the infinite doomscroll, the downvote has become a frighteningly effective means of squashing heterodoxy and dissent; it is only those messages that are approved of and given assent to by the masses that become visible on the medium. Those who take a principled stand are immediately squashed down by the downvote mob, or worse, suffer from severe censure and invective at the hands of those zealous enforcers of orthodoxy. The downvote mechanism is reminiscent of the three "filters" Chomsky wrote of when he was discussing the mass media in "Manufacturing Consent," and the way advertisers, government, and capital all control and filter what content is disseminated to media consumers. The message of modern, audiovisual, short-form, upvote-driven social media is bias and group compliance bereft of nuance. If you want to produce and consume novel ideas you are better served by media based on the written word. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39990133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39990133
tokendem 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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ColinWright 2y ago
This is instructive: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22In%20the%20Beginning%20Was%20the%20Command%20Line%22&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
rrnechmech 2y ago
This is timeless
ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
One major advantage of the CLI is that instructions/fixes etc are very concise and can be easily communicated. If someone has a Linux system that needs a known fix, then it's trivial to send someone the commands to copy/paste into a terminal. However, if there's a known fix for a graphical program, then it suddenly becomes much harder to communicate - do you go for a textual instruction (e.g. click on the hamburger menu, then choose "preferences"...), or a series of screenshots along with some text?
- anthomtb 2y ago
  I think your trailing question is a hypothetical but to answer: Screenshots along with text, then use Microsoft Paint to mark up the screen shots. For example, circling the appropriate menu option in a thick red line. Sadly, I do not know how to graphically convey the double-click operation. Its a time consuming and error prone process, best used if the buggy GUI application is abandonware. Otherwise, the new version will have the same bug or non-intuitive process but the GUI will be unrecognizable. Probably because some manager, somewhere, read too many HN articles and decided a user-facing refactor was the most important thing they could possibly do.
  - ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
    You raise a good point about GUIs changing over time. Obviously, CLIs can change, but that happens less often and is usually in response to a poorly thought out first attempt at providing functionality (or when additional functionality is bolted on).
    - dredmorbius 2y ago
      Scripts are UI glue in more than one sense. The usual interpretation is that scripts glue together system commands that don't otherwise incorporate one another. This is tremendously useful and is by itself a huge advantage over GUIs. But the second sense is that vast libraries of scripts keep developers bound to their previous UI promises. You don't capriciously change command-line options without raising all kinds of ire. I've seen GNU tools (tar comes to mind) in which options have been "deprecated" for decades, yet are still available. I seem to recall a very small number of cases where options had their senses entirely inverted, to much protest, and ultimately abandonment of those tools. In other cases you've got generations of programs which support backwards-compatible options with precursors: exim and postfix with sendmail, ssh with rsh, alpine with pine, off the top of my head. Developer headspace and script compatibility are valuable. On that note, whilst I find the *BSD's extreme conservatism annoying myself, I can appreciate that it does lead to increased consistency over time as compared with GNU userland.
booleandilemma 2y ago
The capitalist system loves the CLI. That complicated series of commands you just ran? Copy and paste them into the Jira ticket so the junior employee who makes half your salary can run them next time.
- yakireev 2y ago
  > Copy and paste them into the Jira ticket so the junior employee who makes half your salary can run them next time. Or, more likely: so that you yourself can remember what you did the next time the problem arises. Or your colleague, who is senior, but does not know this part of the codebase or infra well. Heck, you can even write a shell script, automate things and have your productivity increased! These things will be just as true and useful in some communist FOSS context as they are in a capitalist system.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  It’s not capitalist oppression to not want to reinvent the wheel every time. If the solution to a problem is as simple as “copy and paste this command”, I want to hand that off to a junior employee so I can go do other things that require more creativity.
bee_rider 2y ago
> 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. I was a kid at the time, but did many people actually buy windows? I know about the ad-thing where the cast of Friends or whatever bought windows 95, but as I recall even back then the OS just came with the device. The only exception was OSX, which was a “Big Deal,” even non-technical people downloaded it. Anyway, it is funny to see this in retrospect. Nowadays, operating systems have become so commoditized that you can’t even make a business selling them. I love Linux but his description is quite optimistic.
- plasticchris 2y ago
  Yes - people bought it to upgrade, as the step up from dos to 3.1 to win95 was huge.
- MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago
  > I was a kid at the time, but did many people actually buy windows? Yep! Windows did indeed come with machines, but the upgrades were always a big seller. I remember when Windows 3.1 hit the shelves and seemed to be everywhere. Same with Windows 95 but that one was a tougher upgrade because of the increased system requirements.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  Absolutely -- yes Windows came with your PC, but you'd buy the new version as a (cheaper) upgrade if you didn't want to wait until the next PC you bought. Today new OS versions aren't such a big deal, but when Windows 95 came out, and then XP, they were huge, with total interface redesigns. On the other hand, I don't think people went out of their way as much to buy smaller upgrades like Windows 98.
  - Shawnj2 2y ago
    I think the fact that OS updates are free now kinda killed a lot of the marketing/promotion since most consumers will only update if their computer is old.
simonmysun 2y ago
I just wrote a command line interface of LLMs in (almost) pure Bash[1]. I endorse the future of LLMs because of the points in this article. People talk to LLMs the same way we talk to CLI shells, and everything is plain text based (It's Unix philosophy! ). I should've read this earlier to get more ideas before writing the CLI client. [1]: https://github.com/simonmysun/ell https://github.com/simonmysun/ell
deleted 2y ago
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jart 2y ago
> 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. Not anymore. https://justine.lol/ape.html https://justine.lol/ape.html
kaladin_1 2y ago
Thanks for posting. A very interesting read. This is my first time seeing this well written piece. Written in a text file, sign of his distrust for software that mangle your ASCII :)
almog 2y ago
I still remember one of the quotes from The Metaphor Shear chapter, where he tried to explain how he felt after some of his files on his Mac got corrupted to such degree that he just couldn't recover: "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."
macleginn 2y ago
Using plain $LANGUAGE to communicate with LLMs is an interesting contender, which is even easier for end users than GUIs and even less precise and is further removed from the underlying computations. In spirit, it is definitely a step in the same general direction, which makes a lot of formulations in this article sharply prescient.
dang 2y ago
Related: In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314225 - Aug 2023 (2 comments) In the Beginning Was the Command Line - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29373944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29373944 - Nov 2021 (4 comments) In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24998305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24998305 - Nov 2020 (64 comments) In the beginning was the command line (1999) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20684764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20684764 - Aug 2019 (50 comments) In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16843739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16843739 - April 2018 (13 comments) In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12469797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12469797 - Sept 2016 (54 comments) In the beginning was the command line - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11385647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11385647 - March 2016 (1 comment) In the Beginning was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=408226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=408226 - Dec 2008 (12 comments) In the beginning was the command line by Neil Stephenson - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95912 - Jan 2008 (5 comments) In the Beginning Was the Command Line - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47566 - Aug 2007 (2 comments) (Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers. In the case of perennials like this one, it's good to have a new discussion every once in a while so newer user cohorts learn what the classics are.)
larsrc 2y ago
Does this win the HN prize for Most Often Reposted Article? It's been posted on average twice a year for 17 years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22In%20the%20Beginning%20Was%20the%20Command%20Line%22&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- dang 2y ago
  I'm pretty sure it's far from #1 (consider "Story of Mel", "You and Your Research", and many others), but I don't have that list or even know how to create such a list, as it's perturbed by variations in both titles and URLs.
zeruch 2y ago
Such an underrated book.
sharas- 2y ago
My first 486DX PC had a "turbo" button. You press it - and it wasn't just a teletype anymore.
themadturk 2y ago
It may be outdated, but it's still one of my favorite Stephenson texts. It's been a while since I read it, but the best part for me is his explanation of abstraction in graphical systems, which I think is still valuable today as we get further and further away from whatever the fundamental interface is between human and computer.

412 points by conanxin 2y ago

This essay by Neal Stephenson was first published in 1999. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Command_Line https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_... The analogy of OS as cars (Windows is a station wagon, Linux is a tank) is brought up in the recent Acquired episode on Microsoft, where Vista was a Dodge Viper but Windows 7 was a Toyota Camry, which is what users actually wanted.

hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
Windows XP would probably be an old 1970s Volvo that is still, somehow, running in all kinds of places otherwise forgotten by the waking world.
- homarp 2y ago
  like https://www.osnews.com/story/140301/no-southwest-airlines-is-not-still-using-windows-3-1/ https://www.osnews.com/story/140301/no-southwest-airlines-is... :)
- heraldgeezer 2y ago
  OS/2 also! :D
- johnohara 2y ago
  Mostly in Oregon, Northern CA, and parts of Washington. But parts are increasingly hard to find.
  - CRConrad 2y ago
    Mostly in all of Sweden, all of Finland, probably still quite a lot in Denmark, but perhaps not so many in Norway any more (since they are rapidly electrifying[1] the entire national car fleet). ___ [1]: Ironically, the heavy state subsidies for buying an electric car are, like anything else in Norway, financed by... Oil money.
GrumpyYoungMan 2y ago
And Neal Stephenson acknowledged it was obsolete in 2004: "I embraced OS X as soon as it was available and have never looked back. So a lot of 'In the beginning was the command line' is now obsolete. I keep meaning to update it, but if I'm honest with myself, I have to say this is unlikely." https://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-responds-with-wit-and-humor https://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-... But people still dredge this quarter century old apocrypha up and use it to pat themselves on the back for being Linux users. "I use a Hole Hawg! I drive a tank! I'm not like those other fellows because I'm a real hacker!"
- Phiwise_ 2y ago
  "Obsolete" is too strong a word, I think. OSX isn't an evolution of the Macintosh's operating system; That'd be Pink, which was even mentioned, and it crashed and burned. OSX was far closer to a Linux box and a Mac box on the same desk, therefore the only change really needed is to replace mentions of Unix or specifically Linux with Linux/OSX as far as the points of the piece are concerned. If Jobs had paid Torvalds to call OSX "Apple Linux" (Or maybe just called it Apple Berkeley Unix) for some reason this would be moot. I also primarily use Windows and don't have a dog in the fight you mentioned. I might actually dislike Linux more than OSX, though it has been quite a while since I've seriously used the one-button OS.
  - wpm 2y ago
    macOS shares zero lineage with Linux, which itself shares zero lineage with the UNIX derivatives. It would make zero sense for Apple to call macOS "Apple Linux" when it doesn't use the Linux kernel. Mac OS X is closest to a NeXTStep box with a coat of Mac-like polish on top. Even calling it "Apple Berkeley Unix" wouldn't make sense, because the XNU kernel is a mish mash of both BSD 4.3 and the Mach kernel. Linux and the UNIX derivates are not even cousins. Not related. Not even the same species. They just both look like crabs a la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation.
    - 13of40 2y ago
simonmysun 2y ago
I feel now the different way. Linux is never that much more powerful than other OS. It felt more like a tractor 10 years ago and now it is a good alternative to "Toyota Camry" with pretty good user experience. Meanwhile Windows has become those cars with two 27" screen as dashboard, which has bad user experience and full of advertisements.
davidgerard 2y ago
The actual comparison is that Vista was the Ford Edsel (hilarious and widely-mocked failure) but 7 was the Ford Comet (a huge hit). It's a close analogy, because the Comet was actually the next model of Edsel. They just changed the branding. Same with Vista to 7.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
justin66 2y ago
> recent Acquired episode on Microsoft, where Vista was a Dodge Viper but Windows 7 was a Toyota Camry, which is what users actually wanted. I assume if anyone associated with Microsoft compared Vista to anything other than an abject failure, it's because they are - at best - broken or defective people who were involved in the creation of Vista, and therefore not objective and not to be trusted in any way. Dodge Viper? WTF?
- throwawaydummy 2y ago
  Doge Vipers get a bad rep even in need for speed lol but idk enough about cars to know why
  - 00N8 2y ago
    The first generation or two of Vipers were very raw & unrefined, with ~400 horsepower, no stability control, no anti-lock brakes, minimal safety features, cheap & janky looking interiors, etc. It sounds great to me (aside from the lack of a/c & nice ergonomic interior), but it would be extremely easy to have a bad time if you're an average driver. I'm not sure about the analogy though, they might have been thinking of later Viper versions where the complaints would be more about cost, gas mileage, or general impracticality for daily use.
  - jholman 2y ago
    This might help? https://youtu.be/WdtK9Sj8ADw?list=PLoTU9_iCGa6go3vsnxlNn1wZSZo7jvGUG&t=142 https://youtu.be/WdtK9Sj8ADw?list=PLoTU9_iCGa6go3vsnxlNn1wZS...
throwawaydummy 2y ago
I didn’t know myself let alone computers but anyone know why Vista and Windows 8 got such bad reps?
- smackeyacky 2y ago
  They were given “tablet friendly” user interfaces that made navigation extremely difficult. But Microsoft never finished the job so you’d try to find something in the stupid sliding screen interface only to be thrown into a windows 3.1 era control panel. Windows server of that era was even worse, as mostly you administered using RDP but it never played nice with the “hover here to bring up the whole screen menu” required to drive it. Underneath it was just Windows, but the interface ruined it
- theandrewbailey 2y ago
  I'm one of the few people who thought Vista was fine. It mostly got a bad rap because of bad drivers and high system requirements.
- thfuran 2y ago
  Vista significantly changed the security model, introducing UAC and requiring driver signing. This caused a bunch of turmoil. It also had much higher system requirements than xp for decent performance, meaning that it ran at least a bit shit on many people's machines when it was new, and that did it no favors.
bitwize 2y ago
The way I explained my continued loathing of Microsoft to a friend was that back in the day, it was like having two choices of car: a Ford Pinto, or a pickup truck. Not everybody needed the heavy transport capabilities of the pickup, but their only choice if they didn't want the added bulk and fuel consumption was the Pinto, which had dangerous failure modes. Later, the Pinto would be withdrawn and replaced with a Ford Taurus, a serviceable but not particularly fun or performant vehicle which worked fine usually, but was based on a transaxle design, so when it did break you had to dismantle the entire front end of the vehicle in order to repair it. And now imagine that there were roads you couldn't drive on and places you couldn't go unless you had one of these three vehicles, simply due to Ford's market pressure on infrastructure planners, not for any good reason; and besides, people mocked you for wanting something else.

yetihehe 2y ago

My favourite part explaining how unix/linux users feel regarding windows: 'THE HOLE HAWG OF OPERATING SYSTEMS'. This essay should be a mandatory reading for all CS students and anyone wanting to call himself hacker.

raldi 2y ago
Yes, and the part about Reagan.
chuchurocka 2y ago
I teach data analytics and it’s required reading on the first week. It doesn’t soften the blow of throwing people in the CLI but provides perspective to why I am.
- askvictor 2y ago
  Just tell them it's the 'chat interface' to the computer.

hgyjnbdet 2y ago

Me: seems like my sort of thing. Me: navigate to linked website, see wall of text. Me: clicks reading mode Me: *193 - 245 minutes* Me: bookmark to read later; probably not

yetihehe 2y ago
It's very engaging, please try reading it.
sshine 2y ago
It’s a short novel. Putting it in a browser window gives it bad odds. You can also listen to it: https://youtu.be/KpaUg6WwdzU https://youtu.be/KpaUg6WwdzU Begins at 01:30, 25 minutes.
- boomskats 2y ago
  > 25 minutes That link is only part 1 (of 7). It's still around 2 and a bit hours of listening in total. https://www.youtube.com/@robertreads4323/videos https://www.youtube.com/@robertreads4323/videos
  - sshine 2y ago
    Thanks for correcting me.
    - boomskats 2y ago
      Thanks for the link! I'm 3/7ths of the way through it.
enugu 2y ago
You can skip ahead to his playful thesis > the universe emerging from the command line. 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.

inciampati 2y ago

I read this during my university graduation ceremonies. It was hidden in a fold in my robes. It was the most fitting thing I could have done, as I immediately changed my life direction and focused on exactly the ideas outlined in this work. My goal: move the world from the command line. I've almost managed to.

throwaway211 2y ago
I like the problem to the move away from IP Chains. We should move to the Command Table.

kkfx 2y ago

To be (re)read together with the Unix Haters Handbook https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf to realize that what we need is re-made LispM, Smalltalk workstations or the OS as a single application, framework opened down to the most low level part, in the user hands, fully end-user programmable, discoverable, and fully integrated. A 2D and even 3D/4D CLI as the UI, witch is the DocUIs with eventual 3D and video/multimedia elements. As a conceptual framework http://augmentingcognition.com/assets/Kay1977.pdf http://augmentingcognition.com/assets/Kay1977.pdf

lproven 2y ago
Riotous applause from the cheap seats
- kkfx 2y ago
  Thanks :-) but allow me to enlarge, in my poor English: "us" the westerns, we came from those who invented the IT, the modern industry. We are evidently in a declining phase. Evidently someone else try to emerge and actually one of the most prominent new power, China, emerge doing what we have done when we was at the top of the world in industrial, public research, education terms. Meaning such "technical model" works. Evidently the financial capitalism have worked for a certain period but does not work anymore. So, why keeping committing suicide? We have started to suicide with the WWI. We kept going with WWII and we continue now. We are still the leader for IT, and we know what does it work, the classic FLOSS/at least open IT model, the one where some sell iron not bits, the one where customers own their systems and bend them as they wish, the one where communication is not owned by some walled gardens but open like on Usenet, classic mails (as opposite to webmails, hiding the decentralized ability for most users who do not own the WebMUA). To continue with the China comparison I've recently bought some battery tools, very cheap crap but enough for domestic usage and I've observed that batteries have a standard connector, I can swap them from different brands issueless, batteries, chargers are "standard". I also own some high end domestic battery tools, who happen to have a damn nfc tag inside the battery tying it to the device, even if inside the battery are classic connected li-ion batteries. The same I observed for BEV, some friends and I have three Chinese BEV from different brands/models and they have a gazillion of common parts. So to say "open/standard pay back" yes, it might erode SOME OEMs margins, but pay back the society at a whole and as a result the OEM itself. The same is valid in software terms. My desktop is Emacs/EXWM, I use as a search&narrow framework consult/orderless/vertico, they simply "plug in" any other packages because the system is a unique application end-user programmable at runtime. You do not need to "specifically support" a package to integrate it. You do not need third party to explicitly support your package to use it together. And what we do instead? Our best to create walled gardens, we have had XMPP, SIP/RTP and now most are on Zoom/Teams/Meet/Slack/Skype/* all walled gardens. Even many push to substitute emails with some new colorful walled garden. Similarly any app try to add features someone else have since it's impossible just using it, like a sexp in a buffer. As a result modern IT from Unix where the user at least can combine simple tools with some IPCs in script we are limited by cut&paste, drag&drop and not much more. Anything is damn complicated because there are no shared data structure in a shared environment, but any "app" do everything on it's own, often with a gazillion of dependencies who have a gazillion of deps on their own, with a big load of parsers of any kind and even "some standard to pass data" (like JSON) who try to emerge but are still not a shared data structure in an unique integrated environment. All of this is the old Greenspun's tenth rule and actually is killing our IT innovation, killing one of the last sector we still rules, for the same issues that have killed our industry essentially.

mg 2y ago

The command line is still king. Whenever I see new coders struggle, it usually is because they: - Don't know the context of what they are executing - Don't know about the concept of input and output On the command line, the context is obvious. You are in the context. The working dir, the environment, everything is the same for you as it is for the thing you execute via ./mything.py. Input and output are also obvious. Input is what you type, output is what you see. Using pipes to redirect it comes naturally. Not being natively connected to context, input and output is often at the core of problems I see even senior programmers struggle with.

pavlov 2y ago
This is such generic advice about computing, it’s like saying: “To make a building, you need to have a foundation, something to keep the roof up, and a way for people to move inside.”
- mg 2y ago
  The analogy I would make is that living in the command line is like using a CAD program while living in IDEs is like using CorelDraw to design houses. CorelDraw feels more efficient because one quickly has what looks like a beautiful, colorful house on the screen. And then one does not understand why the doors don't work correctly.
dakiol 2y ago
The more experience I accumulate, the more I rely on GUIs. Explanation: when I was younger I used exclusively the CLI and underestimated GUIs. Now I tend to appreciate GUIs and use them more.
- lucianbr 2y ago
  If you're experienced with the command line, it's easy to use GUIs and get good results. If one starts with GUIs and doesn't really understand what is behind, then all kinds of trouble happen. So I guess, as with any tool, understanding is key.

KingOfCoders 2y ago

In the beginning was a switch.

deleted 2y ago

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xg15 2y ago

> 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!" Did Linux distros actually offer support at some point? (By what I assume would be some project contributor ssh-ing into your machine) My impression was always the arguments were more like "Well yes, but we have this literal building full of technical manuals that describe every bolt and screw of your tank - and we can give you a copy of all of them for free! And think about it - after you have taken some modest effort to read and learn all of them by heart, you'll be able to fix and even modify your tank all on your own! No more dependence on crooked car dealers! And if you need help, we have monthly community meetups you can attend and talk with people just as tank-crazy as you are! (please only attend if you're sufficiently tank-crazy, and PLEASE only after you read the manuals)" (This was decades ago, the situation has gotten significantly better today)

delusional 2y ago
> Did Linux distros actually offer support at some point? (By what I assume would be some project contributor ssh-ing into your machine) I don't think that was the intended implication. I think the analogy is more akin to: "If send us a bug report, we'll fix it and ship a new version that you can download and use for free." In the olden days, you'd have to buy a new version of commercial software if it didn't work for your machine, complementary patches were rare.
- jmclnx 2y ago
  Depends on where you lived. In the early days there were lots of LUGs in some areas, usually in college areas, but some would be hosted at a few Companies. I think DEC had one or two. And you could find someone who would meet you somewhere to help you out, it was an exciting time. Also there were lots of install fests for Linux. Most activity took place on USENET, so getting help was rather easy. For example, I had asked how I could connect 2 monitors to my 386SX, one controlled by a VGA card, the other via a mono-card, each monitor with a couple of VTs. That was doable with Coherent on install. A day later I got a patch. Things moved very quickly back then :)

willguest 2y ago

Shouldn't this be written in Latin?

layer8 2y ago
Hebrew, you mean?

qubex 2y ago

I’ve got this in soft-cover. I think I read it back before the turn of the millennium. As a BeOS aficionado I loved the reference to batmobiles.

danielovichdk 2y ago

Yes. Cults are real. At the same time very telling. Some people really believe they are better because they have a different machine than someone else. And that shit runs deep.

marmot777 2y ago

Because I had to read this before falling asleep I had audio going out 2x so it sounds like a fifties cartoon.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

nonrandomstring 2y ago

For if your browser isn't okay with the long lines; wget -O - https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt | nroff | less

sschober 2y ago
I love that you can do that with the text.

pavlov 2y ago

The CLI has a massive blind spot in today’s operating systems: it knows nothing useful about events. Yet events are the primary way anything happens on a computer, whether it’s a user system or a server.

fock 2y ago
huh? DBUS is very much a thing and has CLI-tooling?
nonrandomstring 2y ago
Annoying though it may be, you can run a program in the background that can write to your open terminal. Just in userspace you have; dmesg -w tail -f /var/log/messages There's also dbus to monitor on Linux systems and a lot of kernel hook tricks you can use to get a message pop up if an event happens. Because it gets annoying to have a process splurge notification stuff to a term you are working in, that's why you have info-bars which many terminal emulators support.
skydhash 2y ago
In unix world, everything is a file, so you can poll the file waiting for something to happen. And there’s the whole signal thing and dbus exists.
- pavlov 2y ago
  Yeah, these are the event paradigms that I meant by “nothing useful.” Files are not a good abstraction for events. Signals are broken in many ways. And DBus is both extremely clunky to use and non-portable. There isn’t a built-in event paradigm similar to how streams and pipes are an integral part of the Unix-style CLI.
  - dandanua 2y ago
    > Files are not a good abstraction for events Why is that? On the low level everything is a state of electronic cells. Files address those cells in a suitable fashion. Modern programming abstractions such as async/await are very simple, but fail miserably if you need something really complex and efficient.

ryandv 2y ago

The section on "THE INTERFACE CULTURE" is critical to understand in today's digital media landscape. Disney's Animal Kingdom is to the written works of Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie as the GUI is to the command-line interface. The message of one medium is audiovisual spectacle and immersive experience; the other, cold intellectualism demanding participation from the reader to paint a picture in his mind's eye through the interpretation of raw text, words on a screen, or a piece of paper. But this is precisely the same as what is lost in the transition from the command-line interface to the GUI. 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? 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. Elsewhere [0] I have called this concept "post-literacy," and this theme pervades much of Stephenson's work - highly technologically advanced societies outfitted with molecular assemblers and metaverses, populated by illiterate masses who mostly get by through the use of pictographs and hieroglyphic languages (emoji, anyone?). Literacy is for the monks who, cloistered away in their monasteries, still scribble ink scratchings on dead trees and ponder "useless" philosophical quandaries. The structure of modern audiovisual media lends itself to the immediate application of implicit bias. On IRC, in the days of 56k before bandwidth and computer networks had developed to the point of being able to deliver low-latency, high definition audio and video, perhaps even for "real-time" videoconferencing, most of your interactions with others online was mediated through the written word. Nowhere here, unless some party chooses to disclose it, do race, gender, accent, physical appearance, or otherwise, enter into the picture and possibly cloud your judgment of who a person is - or, more importantly, the weight of their words, and whether or not they are correct, or at least insightful; consider Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" paper which first introduced what is now called the "Turing test," and how it was designed to be conducted purely over textual media as a written conversation, so as to avoid influencing through other channels the interrogator's judgment of who is the man, and who is the machine. 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. Moreover, the confusion of symbols for reality, the precession of digitized, audiovisual content from a mere representation to more-than-real, digital hyperreality (since truth and God are all dead and everything is merely a consensual societal hallucination), leads people to mistake pixels on a screen for actual objects; narrative and spin for truth; influencers, videos, and YouTube personalities for actual people; or words from ChatGPT as real wisdom and insight - much in the same way that Searle's so-called "Chinese room" masquerades as an actual native speaker of Mandarin or Cantonese: "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." 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. It simply is the case that we are way too busy, nowadays, to comprehend everything in detail. The structure of modern short-form, upvote-driven media, lends itself to the production of short-form messages and takes with laughably small upper bounds on the amount of information they can contain. In a manner reminiscent of "you are what you eat," you think similarly to the forms of media you consume - and one who consumes primarily short-form media will produce short-form thoughts bereft of nuance and critical thinking, and additionally suffer from all the deficits in attention span we have heard of as the next braindead 10-second short or reel robs you of your concentration, and the next, and the next... Beyond the infectious slot machine-like dopamine gratification of the pull-to-refresh and the infinite doomscroll, the downvote has become a frighteningly effective means of squashing heterodoxy and dissent; it is only those messages that are approved of and given assent to by the masses that become visible on the medium. Those who take a principled stand are immediately squashed down by the downvote mob, or worse, suffer from severe censure and invective at the hands of those zealous enforcers of orthodoxy. The downvote mechanism is reminiscent of the three "filters" Chomsky wrote of when he was discussing the mass media in "Manufacturing Consent," and the way advertisers, government, and capital all control and filter what content is disseminated to media consumers. The message of modern, audiovisual, short-form, upvote-driven social media is bias and group compliance bereft of nuance. If you want to produce and consume novel ideas you are better served by media based on the written word. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39990133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39990133

tokendem 2y ago

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ColinWright 2y ago

This is instructive: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22In%20the%20Beginning%20Was%20the%20Command%20Line%22&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

rrnechmech 2y ago

This is timeless

ndsipa_pomu 2y ago

One major advantage of the CLI is that instructions/fixes etc are very concise and can be easily communicated. If someone has a Linux system that needs a known fix, then it's trivial to send someone the commands to copy/paste into a terminal. However, if there's a known fix for a graphical program, then it suddenly becomes much harder to communicate - do you go for a textual instruction (e.g. click on the hamburger menu, then choose "preferences"...), or a series of screenshots along with some text?

anthomtb 2y ago
I think your trailing question is a hypothetical but to answer: Screenshots along with text, then use Microsoft Paint to mark up the screen shots. For example, circling the appropriate menu option in a thick red line. Sadly, I do not know how to graphically convey the double-click operation. Its a time consuming and error prone process, best used if the buggy GUI application is abandonware. Otherwise, the new version will have the same bug or non-intuitive process but the GUI will be unrecognizable. Probably because some manager, somewhere, read too many HN articles and decided a user-facing refactor was the most important thing they could possibly do.
- ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
  You raise a good point about GUIs changing over time. Obviously, CLIs can change, but that happens less often and is usually in response to a poorly thought out first attempt at providing functionality (or when additional functionality is bolted on).
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    Scripts are UI glue in more than one sense. The usual interpretation is that scripts glue together system commands that don't otherwise incorporate one another. This is tremendously useful and is by itself a huge advantage over GUIs. But the second sense is that vast libraries of scripts keep developers bound to their previous UI promises. You don't capriciously change command-line options without raising all kinds of ire. I've seen GNU tools (tar comes to mind) in which options have been "deprecated" for decades, yet are still available. I seem to recall a very small number of cases where options had their senses entirely inverted, to much protest, and ultimately abandonment of those tools. In other cases you've got generations of programs which support backwards-compatible options with precursors: exim and postfix with sendmail, ssh with rsh, alpine with pine, off the top of my head. Developer headspace and script compatibility are valuable. On that note, whilst I find the *BSD's extreme conservatism annoying myself, I can appreciate that it does lead to increased consistency over time as compared with GNU userland.

booleandilemma 2y ago

The capitalist system loves the CLI. That complicated series of commands you just ran? Copy and paste them into the Jira ticket so the junior employee who makes half your salary can run them next time.

yakireev 2y ago
> Copy and paste them into the Jira ticket so the junior employee who makes half your salary can run them next time. Or, more likely: so that you yourself can remember what you did the next time the problem arises. Or your colleague, who is senior, but does not know this part of the codebase or infra well. Heck, you can even write a shell script, automate things and have your productivity increased! These things will be just as true and useful in some communist FOSS context as they are in a capitalist system.
kstrauser 2y ago
It’s not capitalist oppression to not want to reinvent the wheel every time. If the solution to a problem is as simple as “copy and paste this command”, I want to hand that off to a junior employee so I can go do other things that require more creativity.

bee_rider 2y ago

> 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. I was a kid at the time, but did many people actually buy windows? I know about the ad-thing where the cast of Friends or whatever bought windows 95, but as I recall even back then the OS just came with the device. The only exception was OSX, which was a “Big Deal,” even non-technical people downloaded it. Anyway, it is funny to see this in retrospect. Nowadays, operating systems have become so commoditized that you can’t even make a business selling them. I love Linux but his description is quite optimistic.

plasticchris 2y ago
Yes - people bought it to upgrade, as the step up from dos to 3.1 to win95 was huge.
MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago
> I was a kid at the time, but did many people actually buy windows? Yep! Windows did indeed come with machines, but the upgrades were always a big seller. I remember when Windows 3.1 hit the shelves and seemed to be everywhere. Same with Windows 95 but that one was a tougher upgrade because of the increased system requirements.
crazygringo 2y ago
Absolutely -- yes Windows came with your PC, but you'd buy the new version as a (cheaper) upgrade if you didn't want to wait until the next PC you bought. Today new OS versions aren't such a big deal, but when Windows 95 came out, and then XP, they were huge, with total interface redesigns. On the other hand, I don't think people went out of their way as much to buy smaller upgrades like Windows 98.
- Shawnj2 2y ago
  I think the fact that OS updates are free now kinda killed a lot of the marketing/promotion since most consumers will only update if their computer is old.

simonmysun 2y ago

I just wrote a command line interface of LLMs in (almost) pure Bash[1]. I endorse the future of LLMs because of the points in this article. People talk to LLMs the same way we talk to CLI shells, and everything is plain text based (It's Unix philosophy! ). I should've read this earlier to get more ideas before writing the CLI client. [1]: https://github.com/simonmysun/ell https://github.com/simonmysun/ell

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jart 2y ago

> 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. Not anymore. https://justine.lol/ape.html https://justine.lol/ape.html

kaladin_1 2y ago

Thanks for posting. A very interesting read. This is my first time seeing this well written piece. Written in a text file, sign of his distrust for software that mangle your ASCII :)

almog 2y ago

I still remember one of the quotes from The Metaphor Shear chapter, where he tried to explain how he felt after some of his files on his Mac got corrupted to such degree that he just couldn't recover: "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."

macleginn 2y ago

Using plain $LANGUAGE to communicate with LLMs is an interesting contender, which is even easier for end users than GUIs and even less precise and is further removed from the underlying computations. In spirit, it is definitely a step in the same general direction, which makes a lot of formulations in this article sharply prescient.

dang 2y ago

Related: In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314225 - Aug 2023 (2 comments) In the Beginning Was the Command Line - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29373944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29373944 - Nov 2021 (4 comments) In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24998305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24998305 - Nov 2020 (64 comments) In the beginning was the command line (1999) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20684764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20684764 - Aug 2019 (50 comments) In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16843739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16843739 - April 2018 (13 comments) In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12469797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12469797 - Sept 2016 (54 comments) In the beginning was the command line - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11385647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11385647 - March 2016 (1 comment) In the Beginning was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=408226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=408226 - Dec 2008 (12 comments) In the beginning was the command line by Neil Stephenson - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95912 - Jan 2008 (5 comments) In the Beginning Was the Command Line - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47566 - Aug 2007 (2 comments) (Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers. In the case of perennials like this one, it's good to have a new discussion every once in a while so newer user cohorts learn what the classics are.)

larsrc 2y ago

Does this win the HN prize for Most Often Reposted Article? It's been posted on average twice a year for 17 years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22In%20the%20Beginning%20Was%20the%20Command%20Line%22&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

dang 2y ago
I'm pretty sure it's far from #1 (consider "Story of Mel", "You and Your Research", and many others), but I don't have that list or even know how to create such a list, as it's perturbed by variations in both titles and URLs.

zeruch 2y ago

Such an underrated book.

sharas- 2y ago

My first 486DX PC had a "turbo" button. You press it - and it wasn't just a teletype anymore.

themadturk 2y ago

It may be outdated, but it's still one of my favorite Stephenson texts. It's been a while since I read it, but the best part for me is his explanation of abstraction in graphical systems, which I think is still valuable today as we get further and further away from whatever the fundamental interface is between human and computer.