Craig sent me this and I put it here. It lost quite a bit of
formatting which I'll fix up "any day now"!

It was written about 1999 but the overall information is enjoyable.
-------------------------------------------------------
Cecil,

I had this in my library of things and thought you might enjoy it if you do not already have it.

It is form the author of snow crash, a tech novel from a few years back

Craig Arnold
-------------------------------------------------------
In the Beginning was the Command Line

by Neal Stephenson

About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up wit
h 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 an
d received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But aroun
d the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even strang
er and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This was much
weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sor
t of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plu
g it in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible incarna
tion 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 ver
y 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 zer
oes. Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating syste
m 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 e
ver be (in the parlance of high-tech) "productized."

Yet now the company that Gates and Allen founded is selling operating syste
ms like Gillette sells razor blades. New releases of operating systems are
launched as if they were Hollywood blockbusters, with celebrity endorsement
s, talk show appearances, and world tours. The market for them is vast enou
gh 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 opi
nions about their relative merits. It is commonly understood, even by techn
ically 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 mist
ake, 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? Sh
ipping? Oil? No, operating systems. Item: the Department of Justice is tack
ling Microsoft's supposed OS monopoly with legal tools that were invented t
o restrain the power of Nineteenth-Century robber barons. Item: a woman fri
end 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 i
ntelligent 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; b
ut 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 no
t 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 co
mpared to the technical reviews you can find in PC magazines. But ever sinc
e 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 w
ould 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 h
is face; to his worried passengers, he was a madman, stalling and backfirin
g around Ames, Iowa and eating the dust of rusty Gremlins and Pintos, but i
n 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 t
o 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 you
r hands) just ask anyone who owns a Macintosh and who, on those grounds, im
agines him- or herself to be a member of an oppressed minority group.

The other, somewhat subtler point, was that interface is very important. Su
re, the MGB was a lousy car in almost every way that counted: balky, unreli
able, underpowered. But it was fun to drive. It was responsive. Every pebbl
e on the road was felt in the bones, every nuance in the pavement transmitt
ed 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 nu
mbers into a spreadsheet. But to the driver it was an experience. For a sho
rt time he was extending his body and his senses into a larger realm, and d
oing 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. On
e 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, bu
t they worked, and when they broke you could easily fix them.

There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one day beg
an 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 W
indows) onto the market. This was a Rube Goldberg contraption that, when bo
lted onto a three-speed bicycle, enabled it to keep up, just barely, with A
pple-cars. The users had to wear goggles and were always picking bugs out o
f 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 wor
ker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous s
uccess. 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 chang
ed. The smaller dealership continues to sell sleek Euro-styled sedans and t
o 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 gotte
n 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 desig
ned, more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything el
se 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 dom
es 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; thes
e 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 the
y 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 ordina
ry streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are bei
ng 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 w
ho 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 of
f-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 o
nly to turn up their noses at the philistines going to buy the station wago
ns and ORVs. If they even notice the people on the opposite side of the roa
d, selling the cheaper, technically superior vehicles, these customers deri
de them cranks and half-wits.

The Batmobile outlet sells a few vehicles to the occasional car nut who wan
ts a second vehicle to go with his station wagon, but seems to accept, at l
east 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 hou
r 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 t
hem to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to e
levator 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 ini
tial pang of dread that this essay was about to turn into a tedious, codger
ly reminiscence about how tough we had it back in the old days; rest assure
d that I am actually positioning my pieces on the chessboard, as it were, i
n preparation to make a point about truly hip and up-to-the minute topics l
ike Open Source Software). The teletype was exactly the same sort of machin
e that had been used, for decades, to send and receive telegrams. It was ba
sically a loud typewriter that could only produce UPPERCASE LETTERS. Mounte
d 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 Io
wa State University mainframe across town, you would pick up the phone, dia
l the computer's number, listen for strange noises, and then slam the hands
et down into the rubber cups. If your aim was true, one would wrap its neop
rene lips around the earpiece and the other around the mouthpiece, consumma
ting a kind of informational soixante-neuf. The teletype would shudder as
it was possessed by the spirit of the distant mainframe, and begin to hamme
r out cryptic messages.

Since computer time was a scarce resource, we used a sort of batch processi
ng 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 pr
ograms. 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 s
ame 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 pape
r 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 sor
t of semi-affectionate practical joke. The image of this man sitting there,
gripped in the opening stages of an atavistic fight-or-flight reaction, wi
th millions of bits (megabytes) sifting down out of his hair and into his n
ostrils and mouth, his face gradually turning purple as he built up to an e
xplosion, 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 pha
ses, 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 compute
r 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 inf
ormational cordon sanitaire (three miles of snowdrifts) to school and type
those letters into a machine--not a computer--which would convert the symbo
ls 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 univer
sity mainframe, which would (4) do arithmetic on them and send different nu
mbers back to the teletype. (5) The teletype would convert these numbers ba
ck into letters and hammer them out on a page and (6) I, watching, would co
nstrue 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 a
s meaningful symbols. But this distinction is now being blurred, or at leas
t complicated, by the advent of modern operating systems that use, and freq
uently abuse, the power of metaphor to make computers accessible to a large
r 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, a
nd 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 inter
faces like the MacOS or Windows--which is to say, almost everyone who has e
ver used a computer--may have been startled, or at least bemused, to hear a
bout the telegraph machine that I used to communicate with a computer in 19
73. 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 mo
re amenable than others to being expressed as strings of symbols. Written l
anguage is the easiest of all, because, of course, it consists of strings o
f symbols to begin with. If the symbols happen to belong to a phonetic alph
abet (as opposed to, say, ideograms), converting them into bits is a trivia
l procedure, and one that was nailed, technologically, in the early ninetee
nth century, with the introduction of Morse code and other forms of telegra
phy.

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, hum
ans, quite naturally, communicated with them by simply grafting them on to
the already-existing technologies for translating letters into bits and vic
e versa: teletypes and punch card machines.

These embodied two fundamentally different approaches to computing. When yo
u 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 d
o batch processing with a teletype, as I have already described, by using t
he 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 unawar
e 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 i
n a line and hit the return key. The teletype would send that line to the c
omputer, 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 re
troactively dubbed the Command Line Interface.

When I moved on to college, I did my computing in large, stifling rooms whe
re scores of students would sit in front of slightly updated versions of th
e 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 i
s, mainframes were still mainframes, but they were better at communicating
with a large number of terminals at once. Consequently, it was no longer ne
cessary 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 ev
en knew it existed. We were all off the Batch, and on the Command Line, int
erface 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 o
f these glorified teletypes, and miles of paper shuddered through their pla
tens. Almost all of this paper was thrown away or recycled without ever hav
ing been touched by ink--an ecological atrocity so glaring that those machi
nes soon replaced by video terminals--so-called "glass teletypes"--which we
re quieter and didn't waste paper. Again, though, from the computer's point
of view these were indistinguishable from World War II-era teletype machin
es. In effect we still used Victorian technology to communicate with comput
ers 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 sys
tems 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 so
ftware is to figure out how to take the information that is being worked wi
th (in a graphics program, an image; in a spreadsheet, a grid of numbers) a
nd turn it into a linear string of bytes. These strings of bytes are common
ly called files or (somewhat more hiply) streams. They are to telegrams wha
t 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 Raid
er, your digitized voice mail messages, faxes, and word processing document
s 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, vis
it a site, and then select the View/Document Source menu item. You will get
a bunch of computer code that looks something like this:

<TR> =20

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 repre
sent, 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 an
d 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 mac
hine 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 th
e dirt from home plate." and so on. When the cryptogram on the paper tape a
nnounced a base hit, he would whack the edge of the table with a pencil, cr
eating a little sound effect, and describe the arc of the ball as if he cou
ld actually see it. His listeners, many of whom presumably thought that Rea
gan was actually at the ballpark watching the game, would reconstruct the s
cene 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 s
ame is true of Graphical User Interfaces in general.

So an OS is a stack of metaphors and abstractions that stands between you a
nd the telegrams, and embodying various tricks the programmer used to conve
rt the information you're working with--be it images, e-mail messages, movi
es, 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, tho
ugh, our interaction with the machine is heavily mediated. Everything we do
is interpreted and translated time and again as it works its way down thro
ugh all of the metaphors and abstractions.

The Macintosh OS was a revolution in both the good and bad senses of that w
ord. Obviously it was true that command line interfaces were not for everyo
ne, 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 thos
e sorts of people constituted an incomparably vaster market. It was clear t
he 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 fi
les as linear streams of bytes anymore, vive la revolution, let's see how f
ar we can take this!" No command line interface was available on the Macint
osh; you talked to it with the mouse, or not at all. This was a statement o
f sorts, a credential of revolutionary purity. It seemed that the designers
of the Mac intended to sweep Command Line Interfaces into the dustbin of h
istory.

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--coinciden
tally, the son of the MGB owner--showed me a Macintosh running MacPaint, th
e revolutionary drawing program. It ended in July of 1995 when I tried to s
ave a big important file on my Macintosh Powerbook and instead instead of d
oing so, it annihilated the data so thoroughly that two different disk cras
h 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 h
is car.

The introduction of the Mac triggered a sort of holy war in the computer wo
rld. Were GUIs a brilliant design innovation that made computers more human
-centered and therefore accessible to the masses, leading us toward an unpr
ecedented revolution in human society, or an insulting bit of audiovisual g
imcrackery dreamed up by flaky Bay Area hacker types that stripped computer
s of their power and flexibility and turned the noble and serious work of c
omputing 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 endor
sed the idea of GUIs by coming out with the first Windows. At this point, c
ommand-line partisans were relegated to the status of silly old grouches, a
nd a new conflict was touched off, between users of MacOS and users of Wind
ows.

There was plenty to argue about. The first Macintoshes looked different fro
m other PCs even when they were turned off: they consisted of one box conta
ining 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, lik
e 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 un
it, or CPU, to a far greater extent than is the case with command-line inte
rfaces, which until recently didn't even know that they weren't just talkin
g to teletypes.

This distinction was of a technical and abstract nature, but it became clea
rer when the machine crashed (it is commonly the case with technologies tha
t 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 rand
om 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; t
he 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 a
nd wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked va
guely like static on a broken television set--a "snow crash."

And even after the introduction of Windows, the underlying differences endu
red; when a Windows machine got into trouble, the old command-line interfac
e would fall down over the GUI like an asbestos fire curtain sealing off th
e proscenium of a burning opera. When a Macintosh got into trouble it prese
nted you with a cartoon of a bomb, which was funny the first time you saw i
t.

And these were by no means superficial differences. The reversion of Window
s 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 undern
eath 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 w
illingness, almost an eagerness, to be duped.

Anyway, a Macintosh had to switch individual bits in the memory chips on th
e 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 integra
ted whole--hence the single, hermetically sealed case that made the Macinto
sh 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 pa
y money to look at either. Microsoft's complete disregard for aesthetics ga
ve all of us Mac-lovers plenty of opportunities to look down our noses at t
hem. 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 kn
ew and appreciated computers (hackers, in Steven Levy's non-pejorative sens
e of that word) and in a few other niches such as professional musicians, g
raphic artists and schoolteachers, the Macintosh, for a while, was simply t
he 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 es
tablished that endures to this day: people dislike Microsoft, which is okay
; but they dislike it for reasons that are poorly considered, and in the en
d, 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 s
tockholders) in order to be in the bit business. As an officer of that corp
oration, Bill Gates has one responsibility only, which is to maximize retur
n on investment. He has done this incredibly well. Any actions taken in the
world by Microsoft-any software released by them, for example--are basical
ly 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 (respectivel
y) philistines or half-wits. It is because Microsoft's excellent management
has figured out that they can make more money for their stockholders by re
leasing 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 annoy
ing as watching Apple inscrutably and relentlessly destroy itself.

Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it ble
nds two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, and d
isdainful 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 intel
ligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments. Microso
ft 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 neat
ly: when you started up the program you were treated to a picture of an exp
ensive 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, an
d 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'v
e 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 res
ting on top of a file folder.

These aesthetic gaffes give one an almost uncontrollable urge to make fun o
f Microsoft, but again, it is all beside the point--if Microsoft had done f
ocus group testing of possible alternative graphics, they probably would ha
ve 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 be
ar the brunt of setting up and maintaining home computers, can probably rel
ate 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 dis
tribute, one he'd thought of the idea. The hard part was selling it--reassu
ring customers that they were actually getting something in return for thei
r money.

Anyone who has ever bought a piece of software in a store has had the curio
usly deflating experience of taking the bright shrink-wrapped box home, tea
ring it open, finding that it's 95 percent air, throwing away all the littl
e cards, party favors, and bits of trash, and loading the disk into the com
puter. The end result (after you've lost the disk) is nothing except some i
mages 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 i
nstead. 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 G
ates made it work anyway. He didn't make it work by selling the best softwa
re 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, rattl
ing station wagons. Anyone who doesn't own one feels a little weird, and wo
nders, in spite of himself, whether it might not be time to cease resistanc
e and buy one; anyone who does, feels confident that he has acquired some m
eaningful possession, even on those days when the vehicle is up on a lift i
n an auto repair shop.

All of this is perfectly congruent with membership in the bourgeoisie, whic
h is as much a mental, as a material state. And it explains why Microsoft i
s regularly attacked, on the Net, from both sides. People who are inclined
to feel poor and oppressed construe everything Microsoft does as some sinis
ter Orwellian plot. People who like to think of themselves as intelligent a
nd 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 the
y are going to go on being tacky, and rich, and happy, forever. Microsoft t
herefore bears the same relationship to the Silicon Valley elite as the Bev
erly 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 b
e talking like a hillbilly and wearing bib overalls, and he's still going t
o be a lot richer than Mr. Drysdale.

Even the hardware that Windows ran on, when compared to the machines put ou
t by Apple, looked like white-trash stuff, and still mostly does. The reaso
n 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 r
un MacOS, whereas Windows-compatible hardware came out of a free market. Th
e free market seems to have decided that people will not pay for cool-looki
ng computers; PC hardware makers who hire designers to make their stuff loo
k distinctive get their clocks cleaned by Taiwanese clone makers punching o
ut 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 an
d simply pass the higher prices on to their besotted consumers, like me. On
ly last week (I am writing this sentence in early Jan. 1999) the technology
sections of all the newspapers were filled with adulatory press coverage o
f how Apple had released the iMac in several happenin' new colors like Blue
berry 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 the
m, before subsequently putting them out of business. Macintosh hardware was
, consequently, expensive. You didn't open it up and fool around with it be
cause doing so would void the warranty. In fact the first Mac was specifica
lly designed to be difficult to open--you needed a kit of exotic tools, whi
ch 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 a
lways had a certain disreputable air about them, like pitches for lock-pick
ing 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 eno
ugh to make an OS that works well on one specific piece of hardware, design
ed 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 Internationa
l Date Line, is very difficult, and accounts for much of the troubles peopl
e have using Windows.

THE FINANCIAL EXPLANATION is that Apple, unlike Microsoft, is and always ha
s been a hardware company. It simply depends on revenue from selling hardwa
re, 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 in
terest and ethical turpitude: (1) Geographically I am a Seattleite, of a Sa
turnine 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) Chronological
ly I am a post-Baby Boomer. I feel that way, at least, because I never expe
rienced 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 remov
e it was possible to glean certain patterns, and one that recurred as regul
arly as an urban legend was the one about how someone would move into a com
mune 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 s
ervice 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, bec
ause it is completely at odds with their corporate image. Weren't these the
guys who aired the famous Super Bowl ads showing suited, blindfolded execu
tives 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 an
d other offbeat rebels?

It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they have been able to pla
nt 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 campaig
ns and, perhaps, to a certain amount of wishful thinking in the minds of pe
ople 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 ch
ecks to good ad agencies, you can plant a corporate image in the minds of i
ntelligent 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 g
ive a damn about having a slick image, any more then Dick Nixon did. "I wan
t 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 partisa
ns 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 th
eir money, engaging in a respectable business transaction).

In any event, as of 1987, both MacOS and Windows were out on the market, ru
nning 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 ex
plain when we get to Linux. The upshot is that millions of people got accus
tomed to using GUIs in one form or another. By doing so, they made Apple/Mi
crosoft a lot of money. The fortunes of many people have become bound up wi
th the ability of these companies to continue selling products whose salabi
lity is very much open to question.

HONEY-POT, TAR-PIT, WHATEVER

When Gates and Allen invented the idea of selling software, they ran into c
riticism from both hackers and sober-sided businesspeople. Hackers understo
od 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 ow
n. Accustomed to selling toasters and insurance policies, they naturally ha
d a difficult time understanding how a long collection of ones and zeroes c
ould 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-h
acker as it were, was and is Richard Stallman, who became so annoyed with t
he 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 S
oftware 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, beca
use GNU most certainly IS Unix,. Because of trademark concerns ("Unix" is t
rademarked by AT&T) they simply could not claim that it was Unix, and so, j
ust to be extra safe, they claimed that it wasn't. Notwithstanding the inco
mparable 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 perf
ectly sound and completely doable. It has been done many times. It is inher
ent in the very nature of operating systems.

Operating systems are not strictly necessary. There is no reason why a suff
iciently dedicated coder could not start from nothing with every project an
d write fresh code to handle such basic, low-level operations as controllin
g the read/write heads on the disk drives and lighting up pixels on the scr
een. The very first computers had to be programmed in this way. But since n
early every program needs to carry out those same basic operations, this ap
proach 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 h
ow to write computer programs is to generalize, generalize, generalize. To
make their code as modular and flexible as possible, breaking large problem
s down into small subroutines that can be used over and over again in diffe
rent contexts. Consequently, the development of operating systems, despite
being technically unnecessary, was inevitable. Because at its heart, an ope
rating system is nothing more than a library containing the most commonly u
sed 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 ter
ms. It goes against the whole point of having an operating system. And it i
s impossible to keep them secret anyway. The source code--the original line
s of text written by the programmers--can be kept secret. But an OS as a wh
ole is a collection of small subroutines that do very specific, very clearl
y defined jobs. Exactly what those subroutines do has to be made public, qu
ite explicitly and exactly, or else the OS is completely useless to program
mers; they can't make use of those subroutines if they don't have a complet
e and perfect understanding of what the subroutines do.

The only thing that isn't made public is exactly how the subroutines do wha
t they do. But once you know what a subroutine does, it's generally quite e
asy (if you are a hacker) to write one of your own that does exactly the sa
me 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 t
o write. And the vendors of commercial OSes have already decided, and publi
shed 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, an
other 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 f
ree 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 com
pletely functional Windows OS has been recreated inside of Unix, like a shi
p 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 sol
d 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 tradit
ional (pre-GUI) sense of that phrase is now so cheap and common that it's l
iterally free. Not only could Gates and Allen not sell MS-DOS today, they c
ould not even give it away, because much more powerful OSes are already bei
ng 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 t
hat 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 t
he dump, or strip it for parts. It is the fate of manufactured goods to slo
wly 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 M
icrosoft Word--are an area where innovation brings real, direct, tangible b
enefits to users. The innovations might be new technology straight from the
research department, or they might be in the category of bells and whistle
s, 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 pur
ely technological standpoint. Microsoft's OSes do have their problems, sure
, but they are vastly better than they used to be, and they are adequate fo
r most people.

Why, then, do I say that Microsoft is not such a great operating systems co
mpany? Because the very nature of operating systems is such that it is sens
eless for them to be developed and owned by a specific company. It's a than
kless job to begin with. Applications create possibilities for millions of
credulous users, whereas OSes impose limitations on thousands of grumpy cod
ers, 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 hacke
d 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 t
o 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 boost
er 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 s
elling 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 t
hat most of the world's computer users ended up owning cheaper hardware. Bu
t cheap hardware couldn't run MacOS, and so these people switched to Window
s.

Replace "hardware" with "operating systems," and "Apple" with "Microsoft" a
nd you can see the same thing about to happen all over again. Microsoft dom
inates the OS market, which makes them money and seems like a great idea fo
r now. But cheaper and better OSes are available, and they are growingly po
pular 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 owni
ng these cheaper OSes. But these OSes do not, for the time being, run any M
icrosoft 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 st
and now, Microsoft's applications division loses a customer too. This is no
t such a big deal as long as almost everyone uses Microsoft OSes. But as so
on 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-c
ompile its applications to run under other OSes. But this strategy goes aga
inst most normal corporate instincts. Again the case of Apple is instructiv
e. 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 pro
duct line. But this only had the effect of making their OS more dependent o
n 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 co
rporate instincts will tell them to pile more new features into their opera
ting systems, and then re-jigger their software applications to exploit tho
se special features. But this will only have the effect of making their app
lications 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 kno
w 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 leas
t for a little while.

Accordingly, most of the remainder of this essay will be about those two to
pics.

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. Thi
s 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 pa
rt of the OSes that they belong to--and they are by far the largest part, a
nd by far the most expensive and difficult part to create.

There are only two ways to sell a product: price and features. When OSes ar
e free, OS companies cannot compete on price, and so they compete on featur
es. 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 e
asy to get free browsers, just as to get free OSes. If browsers are free, a
nd OSes are free, it would seem that there is no way to make money from bro
wsers or OSes. But if you can integrate a browser into the OS and thereby i
mbue both of them with new features, you have a salable product.

Setting aside, for the moment, the fact that this makes government anti-tru
st 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 technologica
l trend that comes down the pike ought to be used as a crutch to maintain t
he OS's dominant position. Confronted with the Web phenomenon, Microsoft ha
d to develop a really good web browser, and they did. But then they had a c
hoice: they could have made that browser work on many different OSes, which
would give Microsoft a strong position in the Internet world no matter wha
t happened to their OS market share. Or they could make the browser one wit
h 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 t
hat 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 d
rag 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 radioactiv
e empty space above. Companies that sell OSes exist in a sort of technosphe
re. Underneath is technology that has already become free. Above is technol
ogy that has yet to be developed, or that is too crazy and speculative to b
e productized just yet. Like the Earth's biosphere, the technosphere is ver
y 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, rec
ent 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 beco
me fossilized there too, and in time some more advanced organism will becom
e fossilized on top of you.

The fossil record--the La Brea Tar Pit--of software technology is the Inter
net. Anything that shows up there is free for the taking (possibly illegal,
but free). Executives at companies like Microsoft must get used to the exp
erience--unthinkable in other industries--of throwing millions of dollars i
nto the development of new technologies, such as Web browsers, and then see
ing 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 produ
cts they can keep one step ahead of the fossilization process, but on certa
in days they must feel like mammoths caught at La Brea, using all their ene
rgies to pull their feet, over and over again, out of the sucking hot tar t
hat 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 tramplin
g 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, thes
e companies will forget about what lies above the biosphere: the realm of n
ew technology. In other words, they must hang onto their primitive weapons
and crude competitive instincts, but also evolve powerful brains. This appe
ars to be what Microsoft is doing with its research division, which has bee
n hiring smart people right and left (Here I should mention that although I
know, and socialize with, several people in that company's research divisi
on, we never talk about business issues and I have little to no idea what t
he hell they are up to. I have learned much more about Microsoft by using t
he 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 bet
ween different markets. It is spatial, in other words, and hinges on the ar
bitrageur knowing what is going on simultaneously in different places. Micr
osoft is making money by taking advantage of differences in the price of te
chnology in different times. Temporal arbitrage, if I may coin a phrase, hi
nges on the arbitrageur knowing what technologies people will pay money for
next year, and how soon afterwards those same technologies will become fre
e. 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 tim
e in a given place.

So Apple/Microsoft shower new features upon their users almost daily, in th
e hopes that a steady stream of genuine technical innovations, combined wit
h the "I want to believe" phenomenon, will prevent their customers from loo
king 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 Micr
osoft is addicted to OSes as Apple is to hardware, then they will bet the w
hole farm on their OSes, and tie all of their new applications and technolo
gies 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 t
he 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 w
ith the following tableau vivant: near the entrance a young couple were sta
nding 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 ma
keup off the display and piled them in. Since then I've always thought of t
hat man as the personification of an interesting human tendency: not only a
re 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 dazzleme
nt: to pay money for a theme park ride, vote for a guy who's obviously lyin
g 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 Magi
c Kingdom, walking up Main Street USA. This is a perfect gingerbready Victo
rian 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 camc
order. It was one of the new breed of camcorders where instead of peering t
hrough 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 obstruc
ted his view. Rather than go see a real small town for free, he had paid mo
ney 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 n
ot going to keep pounding it into the ground. I'm not even going to make sn
otty comments about it--after all, I was at Disney World as a paying custom
er. 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. I
f 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 attrac
tion, slated to open in March 1999, called the Maharajah Jungle Trek. It wa
s open for sneak previews when I was there. This is a complete stone-by-sto
ne reproduction of a hypothetical ruin in the jungles of India. According t
o its backstory, it was built by a local rajah in the 16th Century as a gam
e 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 gov
ernment wildlife reserve, now open to visitors.

The place looks more like what I have just described than any actual buildi
ng you might find in India. All the stones in the broken walls are weathere
d 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 th
em, but as thrifty Indian janitors would--with hunks of bamboo and rust-spo
tted 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 o
n your knees.

In one place you walk along a stone wall with a series of old pitted frieze
s carved into it. One end of the wall has broken off and settled into the e
arth, perhaps because of some long-forgotten earthquake, and so a broad jag
ged crack runs across a panel or two, but the story is still readable: firs
t, 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 all
usion (or, in showbiz lingo, a tie-in) to the gigantic Tree of Life that do
minates 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 historical
ly 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 Lif
e with a scimitar, and the animals fleeing every which way. The one after t
hat shows the misguided human getting walloped by a tidal wave, part of a l
atter-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 s
tanding 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 upcom
ing period of grave ecological tribulations that will last for a few decade
s or centuries and end when we find a new harmonious modus vivendi with Nat
ure.

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 deser
ve credit for it. But there are no signatures on the Maharajah's game reser
ve at Disney World. There are no signatures on anything, because it would r
uin the whole effect to have long strings of production credits dangling fr
om every custom-worn brick, as they do from Hollywood movies.

Among Hollywood writers, Disney has the reputation of being a real wicked s
tepmother. It's not hard to see why. Disney is in the business of putting o
ut a product of seamless illusion--a magic mirror that reflects the world b
ack better than it really is. But a writer is literally talking to his or h
er 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 direc
t and explicit channel from user to machine than the GUI, so it is with wor
ds, writer, and reader.

The word, in the end, is the only system of encoding thoughts--the only med
ium--that is not fungible, that refuses to dissolve in the devouring torren
t of electronic media (the richer tourists at Disney World wear t-shirts pr
inted with the names of famous designers, because designs themselves can be
bootlegged easily and with impunity. The only way to make clothing that ca
nnot be legally bootlegged is to print copyrighted and trademarked words on
it; once you have taken that step, the clothing itself doesn't really matt
er, and so a t-shirt is as good as anything else. T-shirts with expensive w
ords on them are now the insignia of the upper class. T-shirts with cheap w
ords, or no words at all, are for the commoners).

But this special quality of words and of written communication would have t
he same effect on Disney's product as spray-painted graffiti on a magic mir
ror. So Disney does most of its communication without resorting to words, a
nd for the most part, the words aren't missed. Some of Disney's older prope
rties, such as Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, and Alice in Wonderland, came ou
t of books. But the authors' names are rarely if ever mentioned, and you ca
n't buy the original books at the Disney store. If you could, they would al
l seem old and queer, like very bad knockoffs of the purer, more authentic
Disney versions. Compared to more recent productions like Beauty and the Be
ast and Mulan, the Disney movies based on these books (particularly Alice i
n 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 the
ir personal strangeness shines straight through all the layers of Disneyfic
ation like x-rays through a wall. Probably for this very reason, Disney see
ms to have stopped buying books altogether, and now finds its themes and ch
aracters in folk tales, which have the lapidary, time-worn quality of the a
ncient bricks in the Maharajah's ruins.

If I can risk a broad generalization, most of the people who go to Disney W
orld have zero interest in absorbing new ideas from books. Which sounds sni
de, but listen: they have no qualms about being presented with ideas in oth
er 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 th
e 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 gra
ves 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 exe
cution is superb. But it's easy to find the whole environment a little cree
py, because something is missing: the translation of all its content into c
lear explicit written words, the attribution of the ideas to specific peopl
e. You can't argue with it. It seems as if a hell of a lot might be being g
lossed over, as if Disney World might be putting one over on us, and possib
ly 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 c
ommand-line interface to the GUI.

Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting labor
ious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. D
isney 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 graphica
l or sensorial ones--a trend that accounts for the success of both Microsof
t and Disney?

Part of it is simply that the world is very complicated now--much more comp
licated 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 ha
ve no choice but to trust some nameless artist at Disney or programmer at A
pple 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, i
ntellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Ger
many, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways
, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and the
y screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those word
y 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 in
tellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those
intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point o
f not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more com
fortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, t
hrough a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works
to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arr
estees 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 outrag
ed. 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 Declaratio
n of Independence.

A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values throug
h 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 the
y are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten C
ommandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveye
d 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, w
ith long runways from which B-52s could take off and reach Cuba, or just ab
out 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, R
ussia and Japan, so that they can come to Disney World and steep in our med
ia 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 eve
ryone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturali
sm and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwit
tingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The ba
sic tenet of multiculturalism (or "honoring diversity" or whatever you want
to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserti
ng (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wron
g, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, th
at 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 hostilit
y towards, all authority figures in modern culture. As David Foster Wallace
has explained in his essay "E Unibus Pluram," this is the fundamental mess
age of television; it is the message that people take home, anyway, after t
hey have steeped in our media long enough. It's not expressed in these high
falutin terms, of course. It comes through as the presumption that all auth
ority figures--teachers, generals, cops, ministers, politicians--are hypocr
itical 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 judgme
nts as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there's no real culture le
ft. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. The ability to make judgm
ents, to believe things, is the entire it point of having a culture. I thin
k this is why guys with machine guns sometimes pop up in places like Luxor,
and begin pumping bullets into Westerners. They perfectly understand the l
esson of McCoy Air Force Base. When their sons come home wearing Chicago Bu
lls 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 wor
ld by television is a culture unto itself, and by the standards of great an
d ancient cultures like Islam and France, it seems grossly inferior, at lea
st at first. The only good thing you can say about it is that it makes worl
d 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 gl
obal monoculture, is completely screwed. Anyone who grows up watching TV, n
ever sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral r
elativism, 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 an
d corporate boards--understand all of this at some level. They pay lip serv
ice to multiculturalism and diversity and non-judgmentalness, but they don'
t raise their own children that way. I have highly educated, technically so
phisticated 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 la
rge 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 sa
me 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 cynic
al, of course, but many spend at least part of their time fretting about wh
at direction the country is going in, and what responsibilities they have.
And so issues that are important to book-reading intellectuals, such as glo
bal 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 sy
stems? 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 wher
e 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 lot
s of subterranean Morlocks who kept the technological wheels turning. But i
n 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. T
he much more numerous Eloi learn everything they know from being steeped fr
om birth in electronic media directed and controlled by book-reading Morloc
ks. So many ignorant people could be dangerous if they got pointed in the w
rong direction, and so we've evolved a popular culture that is (a) almost u
nbelievably infectious and (b) neuters every person who gets infected by it
, by rendering them unwilling to make judgments and incapable of taking sta
nds.

Morlocks, who have the energy and intelligence to comprehend details, go ou
t and master complex subjects and produce Disney-like Sensorial Interfaces
so that Eloi can get the gist without having to strain their minds or endur
e 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 poi
nt of absurdity: your basic snotty intellectual throwing a tantrum about th
ose unlettered philistines. As if I were a self-styled Moses, coming down f
rom the mountain all alone, carrying the stone tablets bearing the Ten Comm
andments carved in immutable stone--the original command-line interface--an
d blowing his stack at the weak, unenlightened Hebrews worshipping images.
Not only that, but it sounds like I'm pumping some sort of conspiracy theor
y.

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 eve
rything in detail. And it's better to comprehend it dimly, through an inter
face, 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 mut
ual 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 int
o regular dudes--construction workers, auto mechanics, taxi drivers, galoot
s in general--who were largely aliterate until something made it necessary
for them to become readers and start actually thinking about things. Perhap
s 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 s
imply got bored. Such people can get up to speed on particular subjects qui
te rapidly. Sometimes their lack of a broad education makes them over-apt t
o 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 f
ads and whims of voters who actually believe that there are significant dif
ferences 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 p
at and saccharine, but, hey, if the result of that is to instill basically
warm and sympathetic reflexes, at a preverbal level, into hundreds of milli
ons of unlettered media-steepers, then how bad can it be? We killed a lobst
er in our kitchen last night and my daughter cried for an hour. The Japanes
e, who used to be just about the fiercest people on earth, have become infa
tuated with cuddly adorable cartoon characters. My own family--the people I
know best--is divided about evenly between people who will probably read t
his essay and people who almost certainly won't, and I can't say for sure t
hat one group is necessarily warmer, happier, or better-adjusted than the o
ther.

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 al
l hidden assumptions, and cruelly punished laziness and imprecision. Then t
he interface-makers went to work on their GUIs, and introduced a new semiot
ic layer between people and machines. People who use such systems have abdi
cated the responsibility, and surrendered the power, of sending bits direct
ly to the chip that's doing the arithmetic, and handed that responsibility
and power over to the OS. This is tempting because giving clear instruction
s, to anyone or anything, is difficult. We cannot do it without thinking, a
nd depending on the complexity of the situation, we may have to think hard
about abstract things, and consider any number of ramifications, in order t
o 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 th
at tries to translate humans' vaguely expressed intentions into bits. In ef
fect we are asking our computers to shoulder responsibilities that have alw
ays been considered the province of human beings--we want them to understan
d our desires, to anticipate our needs, to foresee consequences, to make co
nnections, to handle routine chores without being asked, to remind us of wh
at 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 thr
ough a set of conventions--menus, buttons, and so on. These work in the sen
se that analogies work: they help Eloi understand abstract or unfamiliar co
ncepts 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 subs
umed any number of lesser (and frequently conflicting, or at least mixed) m
etaphors. Under a GUI, a file (frequently called "document") is metaphrased
as a window on the screen (which is called a "desktop"). The window is alm
ost always too small to contain the document and so you "move around," or,
more pretentiously, "navigate" in the document by "clicking and dragging" t
he "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 (a
t 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 d
econstruct 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, p
ermanent, immutable records of it. But computer documents are volatile, eph
emeral constellations of data. Sometimes (as when you've just opened or sav
ed them) the document as portrayed in the window is identical to what is st
ored, 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 a
ny case, every time you hit "Save" you annihilate the previous version of t
he "document" and replace it with whatever happens to be in the window at t
he moment. So even the word "save" is being used in a sense that is grotesq
uely misleading---"destroy one version, save another" would be more accurat
e.

Anyone who uses a word processor for very long inevitably has the experienc
e 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 disapp
ears 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 warn
ing, it is completely and irretrievably gone, as if it had never existed. T
he user is left with a feeling of disorientation (to say nothing of annoyan
ce) stemming from a kind of metaphor shear--you realize that you've been li
ving 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 diff
erent from, and in many cases almost diametrically opposed to, the old. Som
ewhat improbably, this has worked very well, at least from a commercial sta
ndpoint, 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 i
n a few minutes. Everything works a little differently, like European plumb
ing--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 averag
e 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 importa
nt--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 nu
merous interesting ways of affecting the real world: making paper spew out
of printers, causing words to appear on screens thousands of miles away, sh
ooting beams of radiation through cancer patients, creating realistic movin
g 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 c
hange channels and show program guides. Modern cellular telephones have a c
rude GUI built into a tiny LCD screen. Even Legos now have a GUI: you can b
uy a Lego set called Mindstorms that enables you to build little Lego robot
s 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 typ
ewriter. 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 with
out some sort of interface that enables them to use it. The internal combus
tion engine was a technological marvel in its day, but useless as a consume
r good until a clutch, transmission, steering wheel and throttle were conne
cted to it. That odd collection of gizmos, which survives to this day in ev
ery 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 both
ered 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 s
teering 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 imagina
ble 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 mechanic
al controls. My friend's dad, the gentleman who was restoring the MGB, neve
r 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 lea
rn it. Likewise with the dial telephone and the AM radio. By the time of th
e Second World War, most people knew several interfaces: they could not onl
y churn butter but also drive a car, dial a telephone, turn on a radio, sum
mon flame from a cigarette lighter, and change a light bulb.

But now every little thing--wristwatches, VCRs, stoves--is jammed with feat
ures, 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 eve
n 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 compe
te without offering features.

It's no longer acceptable for engineers to invent a wholly novel user inter
face for every new product, as they did in the case of the automobile, part
ly because it's too expensive and partly because ordinary people can only l
earn so much. If the VCR had been invented a hundred years ago, it would ha
ve 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 be
cause the VCR was invented when it was--during a sort of awkward transition
al 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 en
ough to the engineers responsible for it, but to many users it was simply i
mpossible. Thus the famous blinking 12:00 that appears on so many VCRs. Com
puter 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 th
at you can set the time and control other features through a sort of primit
ive GUI. GUIs have virtual pushbuttons too, of course, but they also have o
ther 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 t
he front of the machine, and so the blinking 12:00 itself is slowly disappe
aring 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 be
come a sort of meta-interface that is pressed into service for every new pi
ece 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 no
w is having some kind of interface that customers will actually use, so tha
t 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 e
asy and simple, and putting a nice interface on top of it does not change t
hat 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 da
ngerous.

By using GUIs all the time we have insensibly bought into a premise that fe
w people would have accepted if it were presented to them bluntly: namely,
that hard things can be made easy, and complicated things simple, by puttin
g 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 em
ploys facile generalizations in almost every sentence. Readers rarely have
to think, and are spared all of the difficulty and tedium typically involve
d 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 arou
nd 1985. After some initial hassles I found it to be a better tool than Mac
Write, which was its only competition at the time. I wrote a lot of stuff i
n early versions of Word, storing it all on floppies, and transferred the c
ontents 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 tha
t as a writer it made sense for me to spend a certain amount of money on to
ols.

Sometime in the mid-1980's I attempted to open one of my old, circa-1985 Wo
rd documents using the version of Word then current: 6.0 It didn't work. Wo
rd 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 lett
ers that made up the text of the document. My words were still there. But t
he formatting had been run through a log chipper--the words I'd written wer
e 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 u
sing computers. It's easy to buy little file converter programs that will t
ake care of this problem. But if you are a writer whose career is words, wh
ose professional identity is a corpus of written documents, this kind of th
ing is extremely disquieting. There are very few fixed assumptions in my li
ne of work, but one of them is that once you have written a word, it is wri
tten, and cannot be unwritten. The ink stains the paper, the chisel cuts th
e stone, the stylus marks the clay, and something has irrevocably happened
(my brother-in-law is a theologian who reads 3250-year-old cuneiform tablet
s--he can recognize the handwriting of particular scribes, and identify the
m by name). But word-processing software--particularly the sort that employ
s 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 year
s' literary output can cease to exist.

Now this was technically a fault in the application (Word 6.0 for the Macin
tosh) 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 an
d 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 fl
ashy 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 consequ
ence 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 h
otel, placing myself in the hands of past masters of the Sensorial Interfac
e, and had sat down in my room and written a story in ballpoint pen on a ye
llow legal pad, and when I returned from dinner, discovered that the maid h
ad 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 ra
ndom from the dictionary. Appalling, sure, but I couldn't really lodge a co
mplaint 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 El
oi.

LINUX

During the late 1980's and early 1990's I spent a lot of time programming M
acintoshes, and eventually decided for fork over several hundred dollars fo
r 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 Macint
osh code. Given that MacOS was far more technologically advanced, at the ti
me, 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 creati
ve engineers, I had high expectations. It arrived on a stack of floppy disk
s about a foot high, and so there was plenty of time for my excitement to b
uild during the endless installation process. The first time I launched MPW
, I was probably expecting some kind of touch-feely multimedia showcase. In
stead it was austere, almost to the point of being intimidating. It was a s
crolling window into which you could type simple, unformatted text. The sys
tem would then interpret these lines of text as commands, and try to execut
e 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 inv
oked by typing their names, and which I learned to use only gradually. It w
as 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-crea
tion of Unix.

In other words, the first thing that Apple's hackers had done when they'd g
ot the MacOS up and running--probably even before they'd gotten it up and r
unning--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 aroun
d this, but: as far as Apple's hackers were concerned, the Mac's vaunted Gr
aphical User Interface was an impediment, something to be circumvented befo
re 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 r
uns high-tech companies in Boston, had developed a commercial product using
Macintoshes as the front end. Basically the Macs were high-performance gra
phics terminals, chosen for their sweet user interface, giving users access
to a large database of graphical information stored on a network of much m
ore 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-19
80's we had shared the thrill of being high-tech cognoscenti, using superio
r 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 j
oined the network, mysterious crashes began to occur; sometimes the whole n
etwork would just freeze. It was one of those bugs that could not be reprod
uced easily. Finally they figured out that these network crashes were trigg
ered whenever a user, scanning the menus for a particular item, held down t
he 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 w
as not capable of doing anything else until that indecisive user released t
he button.

This is not such a bad thing in a single-user, single-process machine (alth
ough it's a fairly bad thing), but it's no good in a machine that is on a n
etwork, 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 an
d powerful than either MS-DOS or the original MacOS. The only way of connec
ting to the Internet that's worth taking seriously is PPP, the Point-to-Poi
nt Protocol, which (never mind the details) makes your computer--temporaril
y--a full-fledged member of the Global Internet, with its own unique addres
s, and various privileges, powers, and responsibilities appertaining thereu
nto. Technically it means your machine is running the TCP/IP protocol, whic
h, to make a long story short, revolves around sending packets of data back
and forth, in no particular order, and at unpredictable times, according t
o a clever and elegant set of rules. But sending a packet of data is one th
ing, and so an OS that can only do one thing at a time cannot simultaneousl
y be part of the Internet and do anything else. When TCP/IP was invented, r
unning 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 W
indows. 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 lear
ned 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 d
ocument. The document was too big to fit onto a single floppy, and so I had
n't made a backup since leaving home. The PowerBook crashed and wiped out t
he 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 Power
Book with me. My friends at Electric Communities were Mac users who had all
sorts of utility software for unerasing files and recovering from disk cra
shes, 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 system
atically wiped out. We went through that hard disk block by block and found
disjointed fragments of countless old, discarded, forgotten files, but non
e of what I wanted. The metaphor shear was especially brutal that day. It w
as sort of like watching the girl you've been in love with for ten years ge
t 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 synchro
nistic things happened.

(1) Randy Farmer, a co-founder of the company, came in for a quick visit al
ong with his family--he was recovering from back surgery at the time. He ha
d some hot gossip: "Windows 95 mastered today." What this meant was that Mi
crosoft's new operating system had, on this day, been placed on a special c
ompact disk known as a golden master, which would be used to stamp out a ji
ntillion copies in preparation for its thunderous release a few weeks later
This news was received peevishly by the staff of Electric Communities, in
cluding one whose office door was plastered with the usual assortment of ca
rtoons and novelties, e.g.

(2) a copy of a Dilbert cartoon in which Dilbert, the long-suffering corpor
ate 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. Di
lbert recognizes this man, based upon his appearance and affect, as a Unix
hacker, and reacts with a certain mixture of nervousness, awe, and hostilit
y. Dilbert jabs weakly at the disturbing interloper for a couple of frames;
the Unix hacker listens with a kind of infuriating, beatific calm, then, i
n 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 sys
tems. Unlike most Bay Area techies who revered the Macintosh, considering i
t to be a true hacker's machine, Barnes was fond of pointing out that the M
ac, with its hermetically sealed architecture, was actually hostile to hack
ers, who are prone to tinkering and dogmatic about openness. By contrast, t
he IBM-compatible line of machines, which can easily be taken apart and plu
gged 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 ca
lled 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 hard
ware over the years. But Linux's great virtue was, and is, that it would ru
n on exactly the same sort of hardware as the Microsoft OSes--which is to s
ay, 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. Onc
e I got it home, I yanked the hood off, stuck my hands in, and began switch
ing cards around. If something didn't work, I went to a used-computer outle
t and pawed through a bin full of components and bought a new card for a fe
w 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 lar
ger market, the hardware regime changed: the cost of color video cards and
high-resolution monitors began to drop, and is dropping still. This free-fo
r-all approach to hardware meant that Windows was unavoidably clunky compar
ed to MacOS. But the GUI brought computing to such a vast audience that vol
ume went way up and prices collapsed. Meanwhile Apple, which so badly wante
d a clean, integrated OS with video neatly integrated into processing hardw
are, had fallen far behind in market share, at least partly because their b
eautiful hardware cost so much.

But the price that we Mac owners had to pay for superior aesthetics and eng
ineering was not merely a financial one. There was a cultural price too, st
emming 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 machin
e of choice of scruffy, creative hacker types, had actually created a machi
ne that discouraged hacking, while Microsoft, viewed as a technological lag
gard 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 sys
tem wars, like the Russian Army. Most people know it only by reputation, an
d its reputation, as the Dilbert cartoon suggests, is mixed. But everyone s
eems to agree that if it could only get its act together and stop surrender
ing vast tracts of rich agricultural land and hundreds of thousands of pris
oners 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 i
nto 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 Hol
e Hawg does not have the pistol-like design of a cheap homeowner's drill. I
t is a cube of solid metal with a handle sticking out of one face and a chu
ck mounted in another. The cube contains a disconcertingly potent electric
motor. You can hold the handle and operate the trigger with your index fing
er, but unless you are exceptionally strong you cannot control the weight o
f 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 (pr
ovided), which you screw into one side of the iron cube or the other depend
ing 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 chu
nk of pipe.

During the Eighties I did some construction work. One day, another worker l
eaned 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 ho
le through the exterior wall. At some point, the drill bit caught in the wa
ll. The Hole Hawg, following its one and only imperative, kept going. It sp
un the worker's body around like a rag doll, causing him to knock his own l
adder down. Fortunately he kept his grip on the Hole Hawg, which remained l
odged 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 a
s a blender chops cabbage. I also used it to cut a few six-inch-diameter ho
les through an old lath-and-plaster ceiling. I chucked in a new hole saw, w
ent 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 ho
meowner'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 stupi
d consistency of a spinning planet. When the hole saw seized up, the Hole H
awg spun itself and me around, and crushed one of my hands between the stee
l 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, th
ough 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 atavis
tic terror.

But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. The Hole Hawg is dangero
us because it does exactly what you tell it to. It is not bound by the phys
ical limitations that are inherent in a cheap drill, and neither is it limi
ted by safety interlocks that might be built into a homeowner's product by
a liability-conscious manufacturer. The danger lies not in the machine itse
lf but in the user's failure to envision the full consequences of the instr
uctions 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 unpredictabl
e 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 a
nd precisely and with unlimited power, often with disastrous, unforeseen co
nsequences.

Pre-Hole Hawg, I used to examine the drill selection in hardware stores wit
h what I thought was a judicious eye, scorning the smaller low-end models a
nd hefting the big expensive ones appreciatively, wishing I could afford on
e 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 belie
ve that they have purchased an actual tool. Their plastic casings, carefull
y 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 eve
r 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 H
ole Hawg. Such a person, presented with the best and most expensive hardwar
e-store drill, would not even recognize it as such. He might instead miside
ntify it as a child's toy, or some kind of motorized screwdriver. If a sale
sperson or a deluded homeowner referred to it as a drill, he would laugh an
d tell them that they were mistaken--they simply had their terminology wron
g. His interlocutor would go away irritated, and probably feeling rather de
fensive about his basement full of cheap, dangerous, flashy, colorful tools

Unix is the Hole Hawg of operating systems, and Unix hackers, like Doug Bar
nes and the guy in the Dilbert cartoon and many of the other people who pop
ulate Silicon Valley, are like contractor's sons who grew up using only Hol
e Hawgs. They might use Apple/Microsoft OSes to write letters, play video g
ames, 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 who
ami, 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 yo
ur identity. When I started out using Linux, I was on a non-networked machi
ne in my basement, with only one user account, and so when I became aware o
f 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 a
ccess 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 poi
nt 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 n
ested inside each other, many layers deep, even if you aren't doing anythin
g nefarious. Once you have forgotten who and where you are, the whoami comm
and is indispensible. I use it all the time.

The file systems of Unix machines all have the same general structure. On y
our flimsy operating systems, you can create directories (folders) and give
them names like Frodo or My Stuff and put them pretty much anywhere you li
ke. But under Unix the highest level--the root--of the filesystem is always
designated with the single character "/" and it always contains the same s
et 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 s
ubdirectories. Note the obsessive use of abbreviations and avoidance of cap
ital 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 thre
e-letter nubbins, like stones smoothed by a river.

This is not the place to try to explain why each of the above directories e
xists, and what is contained in it. At first it all seems obscure; worse, i
t seems deliberately obscure. When I started using Linux I was accustomed t
o being able to create directories wherever I wanted and to give them whate
ver names struck my fancy. Under Unix you are free to do that, of course (y
ou 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 b
est 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, th
e 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 Uni
x hackers their confidence in the system, and the attitude of calm, unshaka
ble, annoying superiority captured in the Dilbert cartoon. Windows 95 and M
acOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific compan
ies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly c
ompiled 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 t
hey were living bodies of narrative that many people knew by heart, and tol
d over and over again--making their own personal embellishments whenever it
struck their fancy. The bad embellishments were shouted down, the good one
s picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated int
o the story. Likewise, Unix is known, loved, and understood by so many hack
ers 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 o
f OSes as things that absolutely have to be bought.

Many hackers have launched more or less successful re-implementations of th
e Unix ideal. Each one brings in new embellishments. Some of them die out q
uickly, some are merged with similar, parallel innovations created by diffe
rent hackers attacking the same problem, others still are embraced, and ado
pted into the epic. Thus Unix has slowly accreted around a simple kernel an
d acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, lik
e the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understandin
g it is more like anatomy than physics.

For at least a year, prior to my adoption of Linux, I had been hearing abou
t it. Credible, well-informed people kept telling me that a bunch of hacker
s had got together an implentation of Unix that could be downloaded, free o
f charge, from the Internet. For a long time I could not bring myself to ta
ke the notion seriously. It was like hearing rumors that a group of model r
ocket enthusiasts had created a completely functional Saturn V by exchangin
g 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 L
inus 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 r
un on PC-compatible hardware. And indeed Torvalds deserves all the credit h
e has ever gotten, and a whole lot more. But he could not have made it happ
en 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 h
e got from Stallman's GNU project.

And he had to have cheap hardware on which to write that code. Cheap hardwa
re 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 orde
r 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 i
t, so that the unit cost eventually drops. For reasons already explained, A
pple had no desire to see the cost of hardware drop. The only reason Torval
ds 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 m
arket conditions that allowed hardware prices to plummet. In trying to unde
rstand the Linux phenomenon, then, we have to look not to a single innovato
r but to a sort of bizarre Trinity: Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and B
ill 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 som
e other part of the world typically go through several stages of culture sh
ock: first, dumb wide-eyed astonishment. Then a tentative engagement with t
he new country's manners, cuisine, public transit systems and toilets, lead
ing to a brief period of fatuous confidence that they are instant experts o
n the new country. As the visit wears on, homesickness begins to set in, an
d 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 co
uld 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 s
he may have learned a good deal more about America than about the country t
hey 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 f
lavor of the place and--more importantly--to lay bare everything that is ta
ken for granted, and all that could have been done differently, under Windo
ws or MacOS.

You can't try it unless you install it. With any other OS, installing it wo
uld be a straightforward transaction: in exchange for money, some company w
ould 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 f
riendship, 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 witho
ut 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 wo
rk in some way, it is mysterious and infuriating and turns otherwise reason
able 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 hidde
n behind a wall of interface. Linux does things the Egypt way, with vast co
mplexity 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 c
rying out loud! Will you people get a grip on yourselves!?" But this does n
ot 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 rig
ht files and putting them in the right places, but there probably are not m
ore than a few hundred people in the world who could create a functioning L
inux system in that way. What you really need is a distribution of Linux, w
hich means a prepackaged set of files. But distributions are a separate thi
ng from Linux per se.

Linux per se is not a specific set of ones and zeroes, but a self-organizin
g Net subculture. The end result of its collective lucubrations is a vast b
ody of source code, almost all written in C (the dominant computer programm
ing 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 som
e 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 u
sers, but they are of gigantic cultural and political significance, because
Microsoft and Apple keep them secret while Linux makes them public. They a
re the family jewels. They are the sort of thing that in Hollywood thriller
s 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 bec
ome free, like Linux--only not as good, because no one would be around to f
ix bugs and answer questions. Linux is "open source" software meaning, simp
ly, that anyone can get copies of its source code files.

Your computer doesn't want source code any more than you do; it wants objec
t code. Object code files typically have the suffix .o and are unreadable a
ll but a few, highly strange humans, because they consist of ones and zeroe
s. 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 e
ight bits all to itself. This creates a potential "alphabet" of 256 distinc
t characters, in that eight binary digits can form that many unique pattern
s. In practice, of course, we tend to limit ourselves to the familiar lette
rs 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 hi
gh school teletype, which in turn were the same one used by the telegraph i
ndustry for decades previously. ASCII text files, in other words, are teleg
rams, and as such they have no typographical frills. But for the same reaso
n they are eternal, because the code never changes, and universal, because
every text editing and word processing software ever written knows about th
is code.

Therefore just about any software can be used to create, edit, and read sou
rce code files. Object code files, then, are created from these source file
s by a piece of software called a compiler, and forged into a working appli
cation 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 interface
s 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 wer
e, the very best software is usually the free stuff. Editor, compiler and l
inker are to hackers what ponies, stirrups, and archery sets were to the Mo
ngols. Hackers live in the saddle, and hack on their own tools even while t
hey are using them to create new applications. It is quite inconceivable th
at superior hacking tools could have been created from a blank sheet of pap
er by product engineers. Even if they are the brightest engineers in the wo
rld they are simply outnumbered.

In the GNU/Linux world there are two major text editing programs: the minim
alist 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, whi
ch 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 bol
dface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case
of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the abili
ty to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in
the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simp
le-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 formatte
d 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 prin
ting you can use TeX: a vast corpus of typesetting lore written in C and al
so 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 su
rvivalist approach would be to download an editor like emacs, and the GNU T
ools--the compiler and linker--which are polished and excellent to the same
degree as emacs. Equipped with these, one would be able to start downloadi
ng ASCII source code files (/src) and compiling them into binary object cod
e files (/bin) that would run on the machine. But in order to even arrive a
t this point--to get emacs running, for example--you have to have Linux act
ually up and running on your machine. And even a minimal Linux operating sy
stem 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 "distrib
utions" of Linux. If I may extend the Egypt analogy slightly, these entitie
s are a bit like tour guides who meet you at the airport, who speak your la
nguage, and who help guide you through the initial culture shock. If you ar
e an Egyptian, of course, you see it the other way; tour guides exist to ke
ep brutish outlanders from traipsing through your mosques and asking you th
e same questions over and over and over again.

Some of these tour guides are commercial organizations, such as Red Hat Sof
tware, which makes a Linux distribution called Red Hat that has a relativel
y 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 e
xpect some sort of compensation for his services, commercial distributions
need to be paid for. In most cases they cost almost nothing and are well wo
rth 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 sa
y "it has organized itself") along the same lines as Linux in general, whic
h is to say that it consists of volunteers who collaborate over the Net, ea
ch responsible for looking after a different chunk of the system. These peo
ple 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 hav
e them on a CD-ROM. Several different companies have taken it upon themselv
es 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, co
ntaining 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 go
ing 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 packa
ges, but for the cost of stamping out the CD-ROMs.

Every Linux distribution embodies some more or less clever hack for circumv
enting 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" runni
ng Unix. This is slightly alarming the first time you see it, but completel
y 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 dis
k will be a hard drive. But if you have your system configured right, it wi
ll look first for a floppy or CD-ROM disk, and boot from that if one is ava
ilable.

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 di
sk, and blindly begins to execute it. But this is not Microsoft or Apple co
de, 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 t
o scroll up the screen. If you had booted a commercial OS, you would, at th
is point, be seeing a "Welcome to MacOS" cartoon, or a screen filled with c
louds in a blue sky, and a Windows logo. But under Linux you get a long tel
egram printed in stark white letters on a black screen. There is no "welcom
e!" message. Most of the telegram has the semi-inscrutable menace of graffi
ti tags.

Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev syslogd 1.3-3#17: restart. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev ke
rnel: klogd 1.3-3, log source =3D /proc/kmsg started. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRe
v kernel: Loaded 3535 symbols from /System.map. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kern
el: 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 compatibilit
y 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) Pr
o 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 th
eRev kernel: Console: 16 point font, 400 scans Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kerne
l: Console: colour VGA+ 80x25, 1 virtual console (max 63) Dec 14 15:04:15 t
heRev kernel: pcibios_init : BIOS32 Service Directory structure at 0x000fdb
70 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: pcibios_init : BIOS32 Service Directory e
ntry at 0xfdb80 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: pcibios_init : PCI BIOS revi
sion 2.10 entry at 0xfdba1 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Probing PCI hardw
are. 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: Calibrati
ng 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 fo
r Linux NET3.035. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Swansea University Compute
r 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 vers
ion 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: Cal
ibrating delay loop.. ok - 179.40 BogoMIPS Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: T
otal of 2 processors activated (358.81 BogoMIPS). Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev ke
rnel: Serial driver version 4.13 with no serial options enabled Dec 14 15:0
4:15 theRev kernel: tty00 at 0x03f8 (irq =3D 4) is a 16550A Dec 14 15:04:15
theRev kernel: tty01 at 0x02f8 (irq =3D 3) is a 16550A Dec 14 15:04:15 the
Rev kernel: lp1 at 0x0378, (polling) Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: PS/2 au
xiliary pointing device detected -- driver installed. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRe
v 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 PI
IX (Triton) on PCI bus 0 function 57 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: ide0: B
M-DMA at 0xffa0-0xffa7 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: ide1: BM-DMA at 0xffa
8-0xffaf Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: hda: Conner Peripherals 1275MB - CF
S1275A, 1219MB w/64kB Cache, LBA, CHS=3D619/64/63 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev ke
rnel: hdb: Maxtor 84320A5, 4119MB w/256kB Cache, LBA, CHS=3D8928/15/63, DMA
Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: hdc: , ATAPI CDROM drive Dec 15 11:58:06 th
eRev kernel: ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev ker
nel: ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: Flo
ppy 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 PC
87306 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: md driver 0.35 MAX_MD_DEV=3D4, MAX_REA
L=3D8 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: PPP: version 2.2.0 (dynamic channel al
location) Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: TCP compression code copyright 198
9 Regents of the University of California Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: PP
P 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 k
ernel: SLIP: version 0.8.4-NET3.019-NEWTTY (dynamic channels, max=3D256). D
ec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: eth0: 3Com 3c900 Boomerang 10Mbps/Combo at 0x
ef00, 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: Ena
bling 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/lin
ux/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 kerne
l: hdb: hdb1 hdb2 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: VFS: Mounted root (ext2 fi
lesystem) 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: maxima
l 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 Extensio
ns: 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.option
s: No such file or directory Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev diald[87]: No device sp
ecified. 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 t
heRev diald[87]: You must define the remote ip address. Dec 15 11:58:09 the
Rev 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 u
p on whatever processes were damaged, and keeps on rolling. This was decide
dly not true of the early versions of Apple and Microsoft OSes, for the sim
ple 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 wi
th, errors requires a separate process running in parallel with the one tha
t has erred. A kind of superego, if you will, that keeps an eye on all of t
he others, and jumps in when one goes astray. Now that MacOS and Windows ca
n do more than one thing at a time they are much better at dealing with err
ors than they used to be, but they are not even close to Linux or other Uni
ces in this respect; and their greater complexity has made them vulnerable
to new types of errors.

FALLIBILITY, ATONEMENT, REDEMPTION, TRUST, AND OTHER ARCANE TECHNICAL CONCE
PTS

Linux is not capable of having any centrally organized policies dictating h
ow 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 somet
hing bad has happened because the software simply isn't finished yet, or be
cause the user screwed something up, this will be stated forthrightly. The
command line interface makes it easy for programs to dribble out little com
ments, warnings, and messages here and there. Even if the application is im
ploding 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 d
own, you find that it has left behind a series of mild warnings and low-gra
de error messages in the command-line interface window from which you launc
hed 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) pag
es. You can access these either through a GUI (xman) or from the command li
ne (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 mu
tterings of pilots wrestling with the controls of damaged airplanes. The ge
neral feel is of a thousand monumental but obscure struggles seen in the st
op-action light of a strobe. Each programmer is dealing with his own obstac
les and bugs; he is too busy fixing them, and improving the software, to ex
plain things at great length or to maintain elaborate pretensions.

In practice you hardly ever encounter a serious bug while running Linux. Wh
en you do, it is almost always with commercial software (several vendors se
ll software that runs under Linux). The operating system and its fundamenta
l utility programs are too important to contain serious bugs. I have been r
unning Linux every day since late 1995 and have seen many application progr
ams go down in flames, but I have never seen the operating system crash. Ne
ver. Not once. There are quite a few Linux systems that have been running c
ontinuously and working hard for months or years without needing to be rebo
oted.

Commercial OSes have to adopt the same official stance towards errors as Co
mmunist countries had towards poverty. For doctrinal reasons it was not pos
sible to admit that poverty was a serious problem in Communist countries, b
ecause the whole point of Communism was to eradicate poverty. Likewise, com
mercial OS companies like Apple and Microsoft can't go around admitting tha
t their software has bugs and that it crashes all the time, any more than D
isney can issue press releases stating that Mickey Mouse is an actor in a s
uit.

This is a problem, because errors do exist and bugs do happen. Every few mo
nths Bill Gates tries to demo a new Microsoft product in front of a large a
udience only to have it blow up in his face. Commercial OS vendors, as a di
rect consequence of being commercial, are forced to adopt the grossly disin
genuous position that bugs are rare aberrations, usually someone else's fau
lt, and therefore not really worth talking about in any detail. This postur
e, 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 rela
te to their customers. If the documentation were properly written, it would
mention bugs, errors, and crashes on every single page. If the on-line hel
p systems that come with these OSes reflected the experiences and concerns
of their users, they would largely be devoted to instructions on how to cop
e 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 man
y 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 woul
d be in a human being. Most people, nowadays, understand that corporate pre
ss releases are issued for the benefit of the corporation's shareholders an
d not for the enlightenment of the public. Sometimes the results of this in
stitutional dishonesty can be dreadful, as with tobacco and asbestos. In th
e 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 t
herefore 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 th
an millions of happy ones.

Most system administrators I know who work with Windows NT all the time agr
ee that when it hits a snag, it has to be re-booted, and when it gets serio
usly messed up, the only way to fix it is to re-install the operating syste
m from scratch. Or at least this is the only way that they know of to fix i
t, 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 messa
ge out to any of the actual system administrators I know.

Because Linux is not commercial--because it is, in fact, free, as well as r
ather difficult to obtain, install, and operate--it does not have to mainta
in any pretensions as to its reliability. Consequently, it is much more rel
iable. When something goes wrong with Linux, the error is noticed and loudl
y discussed right away. Anyone with the requisite technical knowledge can g
o 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 co
nstitution (http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution), but what really sold
me on it was its phenomenal bug database (http://www.debian.org/Bugs), whi
ch is a sort of interactive Doomsday Book of error, fallibility, and redemp
tion. It is simplicity itself. When had a problem with Debian in early Janu
ary of 1997, I sent in a message describing the problem to submit@bugs.debi
an.org. My problem was promptly assigned a bug report number (#6518) and a
severity level (the available choices being critical, grave, important, nor
mal, fixed, and wishlist) and forwarded to mailing lists where Debian peopl
e 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 f
rom Australia. All of these e-mails gave me the same suggestion, which work
ed, 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 t
he same problem later, they would be able to search through and find the so
lution without having to enter a new, redundant bug report.

Contrast this with the experience that I had when I tried to install Window
s 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 e
xisting 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 slig
htly unusual make and model, and NT did not support as many different mothe
rboards 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-c
ompatible, 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 att
empted to install Windows NT again. Again, the installation died without an
y 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 websi
te 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 fol
low the instructions on a series of help screens. In other words, I was sub
mitting 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 Deb
ian you send in an e-mail telegram. I knew that when I was finished submitt
ing 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 pa
rticipate 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 e
ventually led me to a completely blank page: a dead end.

So I went back and clicked on the buttons for "phone support" and eventuall
y 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 say
ing "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 y
ou would like to purchase a support incident, click OK-you will then be abl
e 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 web
site. 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 t
o 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 simpl
y to use Debian Linux.

In the world of open source software, bug reports are useful information. M
aking them public is a service to other users, and improves the OS. Making
them public systematically is so important that highly intelligent people v
oluntarily 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 lot
s 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 pu
blic 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 s
elling through Pay Per Incident isn't technical support so much as the cont
inued illusion that its customers are engaging in some kind of rational bus
iness transaction. It is a sort of routine maintenance fee for the upkeep o
f 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; Micros
oft's customers want something else.

As of this writing (Jan. 1999), something like 32,000 bugs have been report
ed to the Debian Linux bug database. Almost all of them have been fixed a l
ong 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 hundr
eds of "normal" and less important ones.

Likewise, BeOS (which I'll get to in a minute) has its own bug database (ht
tp://www.be.com/developers/bugs/index.html) with its own classification sys
tem, including such categories as "Not a Bug," "Acknowledged Feature," and
"Will Not Fix." Some of the "bugs" here are nothing more than Be hackers bl
owing 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 stran
ge fashion" and another called "Change of BView frame does not affect, if B
View not attached to a BWindow."

This one is entitled

R4: BeOS missing megalomaniacal figurehead to harness and focus developer r
age

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 g
et a handle on. You can judge the success of an OS not by the quality of it
s features, but by how infamous and disliked the leaders behind them are.

I believe this is a side-effect of developer comraderie under miserable con
ditions. After all, misery loves company. I believe that making the BeOS le
ss 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 h
eadquarters to a far-less-comfortable climate. General environmental discom
fort will breed this attitude within and there truly is no greater recipe f
or success. I would suggest Seattle, but I think it's already taken. You mi
ght try Washington, DC, but definitely not somewhere like San Diego or Tucs
on.

----------------------------

Unfortunately, the Be bug reporting system strips off the names of the peop
le 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 an
d 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 anoth
er 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 engin
e 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 ob
viously bug reports--though they were called something else. Microsoft, in
other words, has got a system up and running that is functionally equivalen
t 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 peop
le 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 t
he respectable techno-bourgeois. Just like Disney, they're making money fro
m 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 manua
ls 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 wer
e 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 bene
fit 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 canno
t help becoming a paranoid conspiracist. Obviously they are hiding somethin
g 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 Centr
al European totalitarianism of the mid-Twentieth Century. The adjectives "K
afkaesque" and "Orwellian" come to mind. It couldn't last, any more than th
e Berlin Wall could, and so now Microsoft has a publicly available bug data
base. 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 th
e 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. Customer
s might be willing to pay $95 to report a problem to Microsoft if, in retur
n, 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 ma
intain the illusion that bugs are rare aberrations. But once the results of
those bug reports become openly available on the Microsoft website, everyt
hing changes. No one is going to cough up $95 to report a problem when chan
ces 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. An
d as the size of the bug database grows, it eventually becomes an open admi
ssion, 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 data
base has logged 32,000 reports so far. But it puts Microsoft on an equal fo
oting with the others and makes it a lot harder for their customers--who wa
nt to believe--to believe.

MEMENTO MORI

Once the Linux machine has finished spitting out its jargonic opening teleg
ram, 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 letter
s on a black screen. There are no windows, menus, or buttons. It does not r
espond to the mouse; it doesn't even know that the mouse is there. It is st
ill possible to run a lot of software at this point. Emacs, for example, ex
ists 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 progr
ams. 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 on
e 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 funct
ion button at the top of my keyboard, I am presented with a fresh, blank, b
lack screen with a login prompt at the top of it. I can log in here and sta
rt some other program, then hit Alt-F1 and go back to the first screen, whi
ch is still doing whatever it was when I left it. Or I can do Alt-F3 and lo
g 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 Inter
net.

Each of these screens is called, in Unix-speak, a tty, which is an abbrevia
tion for teletype. So when I use my Linux system in this way I am going rig
ht back to that small room at Ames High School where I first wrote code twe
nty-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 Lin
ux 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 wh
ite-on-black teletype screen however, as a computational memento mori. It u
sed to be fashionable for a writer to keep a human skull on his desk as a r
eminder that he was mortal, that all about him was vanity. The tty screen r
eminds 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 runnin
g on hundreds of different video cards with different chipsets, amounts of
onboard memory, and motherboard buses. Likewise, there are hundreds of diff
erent types of monitors on the new and used market, each with different spe
cifications, and so there are probably upwards of a million different possi
ble combinations of card and monitor. The only thing they all have in commo
n is that they all work in VGA mode, which is the old command-line screen t
hat you see for a few seconds when you launch Windows. So Linux always star
ts 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 g
lass teletype and into the GUI, you have to tell Linux exactly what kinds o
f 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 signal
s it can't handle.

When I started using Linux this had to be done by hand. I once spent the be
tter part of a month trying to get an oddball monitor to work for me, and f
illed the better part of a composition book with increasingly desperate scr
awled notes. Nowadays, most Linux distributions ship with a program that au
tomatically scans the video card and self-configures the system, so getting
X Windows up and running is nearly as easy as installing an Apple/Microsof
t GUI. The crucial information goes into a file (an ASCII text file, natura
lly) called XF86Config, which is worth looking at even if your distribution
creates it for you automatically. For most people it looks like meaningles
s 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 fi
le that can't even be opened and read by a text editor. All of the importan
t files that make Linux systems work are right out in the open. They are al
ways ASCII text files, so you don't need special tools to read them. You ca
n look at them any time you want, which is good, and you can mess them up a
nd render your system totally dysfunctional, which is not so good.

At any rate, assuming that my XF86Config file is just so, I enter the comma
nd "startx" to launch the X Windows System. The screen blanks out for a min
ute, 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 infra
structure. 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 M
anager) 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 w
indow manager called Enlightenment, which may be the hippest single technol
ogy product I have ever seen, in that (a) it is for Linux, (b) it is freewa
re, (c) it is being developed by a very small number of obsessed hackers, a
nd (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 wh
atever software you want to use. It draws the window frames, menus, and so
on, while the applications themselves draw the actual content in the window
s. The applications might be of any sort: text editors, Web browsers, graph
ics 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 para
llel 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 call
ed ApplixWare. Many commercial software packages, such as Mathematica, Nets
cape 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 non
existent under other OSes. These windows are called "xterm" and contain not
hing 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 comman
d-line interface.

There are many good pieces of Unix software that do not have GUIs at all. T
his 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 h
assle of creating a GUI, or because they simply do not need one. In any eve
nt, those programs can be invoked by typing their names into the command li
ne of an xterm window. The whoami command, mentioned earlier, is a good exa
mple. There is another called wc ("word count") which simply returns the nu
mber of lines, words, and characters in a text file.

The ability to run these little utility programs on the command line is a g
reat 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 i
s 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 w
rite 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, dep
ending on how fancy the programmer wanted to make it. Compiled into a runna
ble 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 n
ot be worth the effort, and so "wc" would never be written as an independen
t 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, eve
n the smallest, and this overhead completely changes the programming enviro
nment. 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-Mar
t 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 countl
ess menu items. The only real drawback is a loss of flexibility for the use
r, but it is a loss that most customers obviously do not notice or care abo
ut. The most serious drawback to the Wal-Mart approach is that most users o
nly want or need a tiny fraction of what is contained in these giant softwa
re 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 us
eful 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 usin
g 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 t
o 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 peopl
e than the GNU tools. And so it is quite possible that this feature of Offi
ce 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. I
f Microsoft ever makes a software package that I use and like, then it real
ly 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 whe
n I'm doing something complicated, like setting up X Windows or fooling aro
und with my Internet connection, and so these notebooks contain only the re
cord 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 L
inux 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 sig
nificant to how the system operates.

Many of the files that control how Linux operates are nothing more than com
mand 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 li
ne. For example, the "find" command, which searches your file system for fi
les that match certain criteria, is fantastically powerful and general. Its
"man" is eleven pages long, and these are pithy pages; you could easily ex
pand them into a whole book. And if that is not complicated enough in and o
f itself, you can always pipe the output of one Unix command to the input o
f another, equally complicated one. The "pon" command, which is used to fir
e up a PPP connection to the Internet, requires so much detailed informatio
n that it is basically impossible to launch it entirely from the command li
ne. Instead you abstract big chunks of its input into three or four differe
nt 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 connec
tion is to be set up; and a secrets file, giving information about your pas
sword.

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 typogr
aphical errors and without having to spend hours flipping through documenta
tion. But I'm not one of them. Like almost all Linux users, I depend on hav
ing all of those details hidden away in thousands of little ASCII text file
s, 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 file
s. I know that if I don't keep track of every little change I've made, I wo
n't be able to get your system back in working order after I've gotten it a
ll 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 wit
h a company called Cygnus Support, which exists to provide assistance to us
ers of free software. But I didn't, because I wanted to see if I could do i
t myself. The answer turned out to be yes, but just barely. And there are m
any 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 bein
g a Morlock some days, and partly because I am afraid of fouling up a syste
m that generally works well.

Though Linux works for me and many other users, its sheer power and general
ity is its Achilles' heel. If you know what you are doing, you can buy a ch
eap 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 para
llel 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, Ether
net cards, TCP/IP sockets, and packet radio links. You can hang half a doze
n different monitors off of it and play DOOM with someone in Australia whil
e tracking communications satellites in orbit and controlling your house's
lights and thermostats and streaming live video from your web-cam and surfi
ng 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 t
echnically superior to other OSes--sometimes make it seem too formidable fo
r 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 wi
th Be, Incorporated, for the simple reason that nothing about it seems to m
ake any sense whatsoever. It was launched in late 1990, which makes it roug
hly contemporary with Linux. From the beginning it has been devoted to crea
ting a new operating system that is, by design, incompatible with all the o
thers (though, as we shall see, it is compatible with Unix in some very imp
ortant ways). If a definition of "celebrity" is someone who is famous for b
eing famous, then Be is an anti-celebrity. It is famous for not being famou
s; it is famous for being doomed. But it has been doomed for an awfully lon
g time.

Be's mission might make more sense to hackers than to other people. In orde
r to explain why I need to explain the concept of cruft, which, to people w
ho 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 supers
tructures of modern steelwork are erected around buildings made in, say, a
Classical style. When new threats arrive--if we have an Ice Age, for exampl
e--additional layers of even more high-tech stuff may be constructed, in tu
rn, around these, until the original building is like a holy relic in a cat
hedral--a shard of yellowed bone enshrined in half a ton of fancy protectiv
e junk.

Analogous measures can be taken to keep creaky old operating systems workin
g. It happens all the time. Ditching an worn-out old OS ought to be simplif
ied by the fact that, unlike old buildings, OSes have no aesthetic or cultu
ral merit that makes them intrinsically worth saving. But it doesn't work t
hat way in practice. If you work with a computer, you have probably customi
zed 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 tak
es a lot of time, and time is money. As already mentioned, the desire to ha
ve one's interactions with complex technologies simplified through the inte
rface, 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 choic
es 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. Bu
t 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 jus
t bought a charming fixer-upper and is now moving the furniture and knickna
cks around, and reorganizing the kitchen cupboards, so that everything's ju
st right. If it is necessary for a bunch of engineers to scurry around in t
he basement shoring up the foundation so that it can support the new cast-i
ron 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 whe
n 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 make
s them feel as if they know what the hell is going on. Sometimes this is ac
tually possible. Adding more RAM to your system is a good example of an upg
rade that is not likely to screw anything up.

Alas, very few upgrades are this clean and simple. Lawrence Lessig, the whi
lom Special Master in the Justice Department's antitrust suit against Micro
soft, complained that he had installed Internet Explorer on his computer, a
nd in so doing, lost all of his bookmarks--his personal list of signposts t
hat 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 th
e garage, discovered that, owing to some inscrutable side-effect, every sig
npost 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 o
nly a small taste of the sort of trouble that upgrades can cause. Crappy ol
d 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 t
he benefits of new technology without forcing us to think about it, or to c
hange 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 op
erating system. In the jargon of hackers, it is called "cruft." An operatin
g 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 i
mpulse 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 t
o 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 t
o so much trouble to save. At some point, one must ask the question: is thi
s really worth it, or should we maybe just tear it down and put up a good o
ne? Should we throw another human wave of structural engineers at stabilizi
ng the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or should we just let the damn thing fall ove
r and build a tower that doesn't suck?

Like an upgrade to an old building, cruft always seems like a good idea whe
n the first layers of it go on--just routine maintenance, sound prudent man
agement. This is especially true if (as it were) you never look into the ce
llar, or behind the drywall. But if you are a hacker who spends all his tim
e 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 tha
t the first generation of GUI operating systems was doomed, and that they w
ould 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 inste
ad 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 busin
ess, 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 jun
gle river by hopping across crocodiles' backs. But in the real world you ev
entually run out of crocodiles, or step on a really smart one.

Speaking of which, Microsoft tackled the same problem in a considerably mor
e orderly way by creating a new OS called Windows NT, which is explicitly i
ntended to be a direct competitor of Unix. NT stands for "New Technology" w
hich might be read as an explicit rejection of cruft. And indeed, NT is rep
uted 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 l
ike 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 cit
izens: if you insist on using old versions of Linux software, you will soon
er or later find yourself drifting through the Bering Straits on a dwindlin
g ice floe. They can get away with this because most of the software is fre
e, so it costs nothing to download up-to-date versions, and because most Li
nux users are Morlocks.

The great idea behind BeOS was to start from a clean sheet of paper and des
ign an OS the right way. And that is exactly what they did. This was obviou
sly 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 f
or 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 c
ompany, Jean-Louis Gassee, is from France--a country that for many years ma
intained its own separate and independent version of the English monarchy a
t a court in St. Germaines, complete with courtiers, coronation ceremonies,
a state religion and a foreign policy. Now, the same annoying yet admirabl
e 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 existin
g 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 BeB
ox was a dual-processor machine, powered by Motorola chips, made specifical
ly 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 tho
ught 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 n
ext to my right elbow as I hit the keys. Be, Inc. is still in business, tho
ugh they stopped making BeBoxes almost immediately after I bought mine. The
y 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 use
d the same sort of Motorola chips that powered the BeBox, this wasn't espec
ially 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 B
eOS were made by Apple.

By this point Be, like Spiderman with his Spider-sense, had developed a kee
n sense of when they were about to get crushed like a bug. Even if they had
n't, the notion of being dependent on Apple--so frail and yet so vicious--f
or their continued existence should have put a fright into anyone. Now enga
ged 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 th
e Motorola G3 chip, they withheld the technical data that Be's engineers wo
uld 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 mot
ley: 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 troubl
es are finally over. Some German hackers have even come up with a Das Blink
enlights replacement: it's a circuit board kit that you can plug into PC-co
mpatible machines running BeOS. It gives you the zooming LED tachometers th
at 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 m
achine. Even after that, though, I will still be able to use it. Because, i
nevitably, someone has now ported Linux to the BeBox.

At any rate, BeOS has an extremely well-thought-out GUI built on a technolo
gical framework that is solid. It is based from the ground up on modern obj
ect-oriented software principles. BeOS software consists of quasi-independe
nt 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 ki
nd 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-pro
cesses. 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 Window
s NT can also do this proficiently).

For this user, a big selling point of BeOS is the built-in Terminal applica
tion, 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, i
t is capable of running most of the GNU software. That is to say that the v
ast 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 util
ity programs. I'm writing this using a modern sort of user-friendly text ed
itor called Pe, written by a Dutchman named Maarten Hekkelman, but when I w
ant 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 themsel
ves 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 s
how. I went because I assumed that the place would be empty and echoing, an
d I felt that they deserved an audience of at least one. In fact, I ended u
p standing in an aisle, for hundreds of students had packed the place. It w
as like a rock concert. One of the two Be engineers on the stage was a blac
k 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 year
s, when BeOS had become all crufty like MacOS and Windows 95, it would be t
ime 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 e
veryone in the room! During the late Eighties, the MacOS was, for a time, t
he 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 crow
ded with hackers with names like Vladimir and Olaf and Pierre, sending flam
es 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 w
ith the assertion that BeOS is "a media operating system" made for media co
ntent 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 analog
y, it is like the Batmobile dealer claiming that he is not really in compet
ition 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 mailin
g lists has a strongly European flavor. At the same time they have made str
enuous efforts to find a niche in Japan, and Hitachi has recently begun bun
dling 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, f
or now, of Microsoft's overwhelmingly strong position in North America. The
y are trying to get themselves established around the edges of the board, a
s it were, in Europe and Japan, where people may be more open to alternativ
e 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 l
ook like suckers. You run the risk of looking naive when you say "I've trie
d 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, min
dshare is more than just a PR issue; it has direct effects on the technolog
y itself. All of the peripheral gizmos that can be hung off of a personal c
omputer--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 motherbo
ards 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 wr
itten but also tested, debugged, upgraded, maintained, and supported. Becau
se the hardware market has become so vast and complicated, what really dete
rmines an OS's fate is not how good the OS is technically, or how much it c
osts, but rather the availability of hardware-specific code. Linux hackers
have to write that code themselves, and they have done an amazingly good jo
b of keeping up to speed. Be, Inc. has to write all their own drivers, thou
gh 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 t
o write its own drivers. Any hardware maker bringing a new video card or pe
ripheral device to market today knows that it will be unsalable unless it c
omes with the hardware-specific code that will make it work under Windows,
and so each hardware maker has accepted the burden of creating and maintain
ing its own library of drivers.

MINDSHARE

The U.S. Government's assertion that Microsoft has a monopoly in the OS mar
ket might be the most patently absurd claim ever advanced by the legal mind
Linux, a technically superior operating system, is being given away for f
ree, 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 monopo
ly 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 mindshar
e, and so any hardware or software maker who wants to be taken seriously fe
els compelled to make a product that is compatible with their operating sys
tems. Since Windows-compatible drivers get written by the hardware makers,
Microsoft doesn't have to write them; in effect, the hardware makers are ad
ding new components to Windows, making it a more capable OS, without chargi
ng 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 cod
ers who write equivalent drivers for free, which Linux does.

But possession of this psychological high ground is different from a monopo
ly 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 re
al. It makes lots of money. Judging from recent legal proceedings in both W
ashingtons, it would appear that this power and this money have inspired so
me very peculiar executives to come out and work for Microsoft, and that Bi
ll Gates should have administered saliva tests to some of them before issui
ng them Microsoft ID cards.

But this is not the sort of power that fits any normal definition of the wo
rd "monopoly," and it's not amenable to a legal fix. The courts may order M
icrosoft to do things differently. They might even split the company up. Bu
t 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, somethi
ng that the framers of our antitrust laws couldn't possibly have imagined.
It looks like one of these modern, wacky chaos-theory phenomena, a complexi
ty thing, in which a whole lot of independent but connected entities (the w
orld's computer users), making decisions on their own, according to a few s
imple 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 rat
ional analysis. Such phenomena are fraught with concealed tipping-points an
d all a-tangle with bizarre feedback loops, and cannot be understood; peopl
e who try, end up (a) going crazy, (b) giving up, (c) forming crackpot theo
ries, 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 positi
on. Maybe that even accounts for some of the weirdos they've hired in the p
ure-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 tel
ling 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 Jack
son will not hand down an order that the brains of everyone in the develope
d world are to be summarily re-programmed. But there's no way to predict wh
en 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 eeri
ly 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 exe
cutives 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 larg
e red button protected by a windowpane. A metal hammer dangles on a chain n
ext to it. Above is a big sign reading: IN THE EVENT OF A CRASH IN MARKET S
HARE, BREAK GLASS.

What happens when someone shatters the glass and hits the button, I don't k
now, but it sure would be interesting to find out. One imagines banks colla
psing all over the world as Microsoft withdraws its cash reserves, and shri
nk-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 wheth
er, at some level, their programmers might heave a big sigh of relief if th
e 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 forc
e, and a few dozen other fundamental constants completely determine what so
rt of universe will emerge from a Big Bang. If these values had been even s
lightly different, the universe would have been a vast ocean of tepid gas o
r 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 s
tars, heavy elements, planets, and life--is to get the basic numbers just r
ight. 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 compa
rable to the probability of making a Unix computer do something useful by l
ogging into a tty and typing in command lines when you have forgotten all o
f the little options and keywords. Every time your right pinky slams that E
NTER key, you are making another try. In some cases the operating system do
es 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 so
metimes, if you have it all just right, the computer grinds away for a whil
e 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 certa
in size--way below the level of quarks, down into the realm of string theor
y--the universe can't be described very well by physics as it has been prac
ticed since the days of Newton. If you look at a small enough scale, you se
e processes that look almost computational in nature.

I think that the message is very clear here: somewhere outside of and beyon
d 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 co
mmand-line interface. It runs on something like a teletype, with lots of no
ise and heat; punched-out bits flutter down into its hopper like drifting s
tars. The demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command line afte
r 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 hesitat
es 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 i
t, 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 hac
kers 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 abl
e to do that. No, the way to gain a towering reputation on the Internet wou
ld be to get so good at tweaking your command line that your universes woul
d spontaneously develop life. And once the way to do that became common kno
wledge, 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 p
lace of some physical constant that would give us an Earth in which, say, H
itler had been accepted into art school after all, and had ended up his day
s as a street artist with cranky political opinions.

Even if that fantasy came true, though, most users (including myself, on ce
rtain days) wouldn't want to bother learning to use all of those arcane com
mands, and struggling with all of the failures; a few dud universes can rea
lly 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 w
ould start to long for an OS that would go all the way to the opposite extr
eme: 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 ha
ve been anticipated by clever programmers, and condensed into a series of d
ialog boxes. By clicking on radio buttons we could choose from among mutual
ly exclusive choices (HETEROSEXUAL/HOMOSEXUAL). Columns of check boxes woul
d enable us to select the things that we wanted in our life (GET MARRIED/WR
ITE 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 wh
ile, with so many choices, and so many hidden interactions between choices.
It could become damn near unmanageable--the blinking twelve problem all ov
er again. The people who brought us this operating system would have to pro
vide 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 l
ives would actually look pretty damn good to most people, good enough, anyw
ay, that they'd be reluctant to tear them open and mess around with them fo
r fear of making them worse. So after a few releases the software would beg
in 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 enum
erated 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 chan
ge that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you do
n't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own.=20

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THE HOLE HAWG OF OPERATING SYSTEMS

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

THE ORAL TRADITION

/usr /etc /var /bin /proc /boot /home /root /sbin /dev /lib /tmp

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