In the beginning was the command line (1999) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

In the beginning was the command line (1999) [pdf]

faculty.georgetown.edu

148 pointsbookofjoe50 comments

I'm guessing some on the hacker news crowd already know this but the author neal Stephenson also wrote Crytonomicon which was the prerequisite reading book for the PayPal mafia back in the days. I've personally only read his book reamde but the accuracy in detail in the novels really reflect quite deep understanding of the tech world including the shadier parts

I love as a book Cryptonomicon but

...Spoilers....

the specific near-future tech product that Stephenson suggested in it never happened – he didn’t in 1999 predict ubiquitous smartphones even though they were less than a decade away. In contrast, Reamde still seems ‘right’ but that’s because it doesn’t contain technology predictions.

I downloaded the article to see if see if it also contained predictions, and if so, whether they were accurate. In classic Stephenson style, the article is a long (60 page) discursive essay, so my check might take a while….

As far as predictions go, out of all of them I’m still of the opinion that The Diamond Age has aged the best.

Perhaps but snow crash was still the most entertaining. :)

SUPER SPOILERS

cryptonomicon wasn't quite supposed to be predictive, though it did "predict" crypto currency. It was and always has been science Fiction, evidence being - ask yourself, how did Enoch Root die in Switzerland and then appear later in a jail cell in the Philippines?

The question was surprisingly answered in "Fall, or Dodge in Hell" in a way I really wasn't expecting but did make it clear that this was an entirely made up universe.

Think of Stephenson's answer to the question, "why call what is obvious Linux, 'Finux?'" He wrote, "for the same reason it's metropolis and not new York." He wanted to be allowed to do whatever he wanted to without horde of Linux users filling up his (now non-existent) inbox. Same for his universe - like ours, but dissimilar enough to allow him to get away with pretty much anything.

> horde of Linux users

less than 2% of all desktops are linux. There is no horde of Linux users, much to my personal dismay. This is a myth.

Ok, so of 2 billion desktops (estimated 2015), that's 40 million Linux users. Of that number, the cross section between "Linux Users" and "readers of Neal Stephenson's works" are probably quite high. It doesn't take much to be faced with a "horde" as any person popular among a niche crowd can easily attest to.

Not to mention at that time Linux was gaining a lot of share in the service space replacing legacy UNIX, Novell and even Windows NT. Just because "hordes" weren't using it on the desktop doesn't mean there weren't hordes who were aware of it and used it at least sometimes, if not daily.

In 1999 I worked for a company in Canada that replaced servers that supported their products and internal servers that ran SCO UNIX with Red Hat boxes. Saved them a lot and we managed to keep everything working as it had on the old servers.

I didn't think of myself has part of a horde at the time but I sure was opinionated about Linux and could see myself being one of those "know-it-all-kids" that hassled Steve had I read his stuff at the time.

Cryptonomicon is OK, but far inferior to Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. I think the latter is an incredibly inspiring vision of technology used for good, as opposed to how today’s best and brightest are focusing their energy into increasing ad click-through conversion rates by 3%.

Diamond Age was amazing when I read it in 2008. I couldn’t believe it had been written in ‘95, given its vision of (what we call) 3d printers, Amazon Turks, software mediated 1:1 relationships, etc. I imagine reading it today, it would read as a likely near-future-history, but in 95 it must have seemed laden with far-fetched original invention, both technological and societal.

the most salient insight from the diamond age is in my opinion the isolated and fragmented nature of the internet and the extreme segregation into cultural communities, when at the same time everyone was talking about how the internet is going to connect everyone and erode all borders.

Reading some of that in the modern era was... uncomfortable but probably valuable.

I read it in the 90s. I think what people forget is in the pre-dot-com-crash era, there was a lot of (unwarranted, it turned out) optimism. If you took the rate of technology advancement and adoption through the 80s and early 90s and extrapolated it forward, and also took into account the social changes it had already driven (and which hadn't really shown their strongly negative sides), it was possible to imagine these really wild possible futures that seemed to be only a few decades off.

Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results, and the wheels fell off that particular cart shortly after 9/11, along with a lot of optimistic visions of the future.

The Diamond Age is set in a horrifying dystopia.

It's also not real clear that the outcome of the primer is a positive for the Mouse Army.

Hmm, I read Snow Crash a few years back, mainly due to the praise. It was certainly a good book, but quite honestly I felt it was overrated. I'm in my late 20s, and it's very possible the book was revolutionary and groundbreaking in 1992, but it does show some age nowadays.

I guess the context is pretty important. Snow Crash is something of a deconstruction of the cyberpunk of the eighties, taking some of the genre’s tropes to their logical conclusion and subverting or inverting many others. It was one of the first influential works of the new wave of science fiction that came to be called post-cyberpunk (a genre notoriously hard to define beyond the obvious ”after cyberpunk”). The clear shift in narrative style after the prologue functions as a boundary of sorts, informing the reader that they are not in Kansas anymore. (Stephenson does this again, even more explicitly, in The Diamond Age!)

Snow Crash came out about 8 years after Neuromancer and 17 years after Shockwave Rider so I don't think it was groundbreaking. Having said that, I did enjoy it and I do see modern weak knock-offs of Snow Crash that have gotten praise from the pundits in the last couple of years.

Cryptonomicon was awesome but too long. I wish it was cut down.

I loved Diamond Age. I still think about it.

Most of Diamond Age is incredible, the rest not so much.

It has Stephenson's usual problem where he forgot to write an ending and it just sort of stops.

Even though the technology was mostly “used for good” it was still a nightmarish dystopia except for the tiny elite phyles. Nanotech was under tight centralized control, as the Foresight Foundation recommends, in the book, but numerous disasters happened anyway. Most of the population lived lives of miserable degradation despite enjoying material abundance due to the assemblers.

Stephenson is a great writer. He just can't write endings. Which is fine because then he just writes never-ending trilogies.

I loved Neal Stephenson at first, but then around the baroque cycle his books became less interesting (to me, personal opinion).

"Baroque Cycle" was a real slog. Much better the second time through when I already had clues who everybody was.

I read this when it was current. I am now old.

Stephenson had a great sideline in really deep-dive nonfiction pieces there for a while (around the same time that Wired was experimenting with running them, in print). It was a pretty great combination.

I'm so old I bought this when it was published in paperback.

https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-was-Command-Line/dp/0380815...

Edit: Amazon informs me that I purchased it on 19 June 2000.

I always forget Amazon's been around that long.

Yeah, IIRC they were still just a book store back then with B&N competing nicely with them. Seems like such a long time ago now!

That same order from June 2000 included five other books and one Sega Dreamcast game (Grand Theft Auto 2), so they must have had a few non-book departments back then.

I guess getting into other media was probably the logical first step so makes sense.

They started selling other media like music and videogames fairly early, but it was quite a while before it became a place to buy literally anything.

I bought it in paperback as well, and read and loved it immediately. I then gave it to a young programmer I met in Sapporo, who was (at the time) working with BeOS.

I have the text version (the proper one, I suppose!) on my laptop as I type.

I handed out copies as Christmas presents one year XD

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speculative economists take note: abundance is hard.

Many previous threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=In%20the%20beginning%20was%20t...

I figured a year was a decent interval...

Yes, reposts are ok after about a year: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

I think he linked it so new readers can see the older comments and get clued in to the conversation. (:

I remember reading In the beginning was the command line back in high school. I liked the comparison with cars. I'm a little sad I never got to use the BeOS that the author so much likens to a batmobile (going from memory). This article even has its own Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co...

For new readers, I'd also strongly recommend "Mother Earth Mother Board" by the same author, Neal Stephenson. In Mother Earth Mother Board, the author writes about the fiber optic cables that connect us across continents.

Original: https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

Previously discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15635028

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8242682

>I'm a little sad I never got to use the BeOS that the author so much likens to a batmobile (going from memory).

You may be interested in Haiku OS then... https://www.haiku-os.org/

Adafruit published this BeOS guide just last week: https://learn.adafruit.com/build-a-bebox-with-beos-and-virtu...

P.S. Wonderful New Yorker piece. I'll be surprised if you don't get some serious job offers from pretty high-class sites as a result.

Care to share a link? Everyone likes a good NYorker piece :)

I think this is what is being referred to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643052

I loved this essay, and own a paperback copy. I also loved his novels Zodiac, REAMDE (a fast, fun read), and Anathem, which was a tough read at first, but I ended up loving it. (I started the first novel of his Baroque Cycle but got bogged down and never finished those ones.)

If you read Zodiac, Anathem and (part of) the Baroque Cycle I assume you’ve read his other books (Cryptonomicon, Diamond Age, Snowcrash...). If not, lucky you!

I discovered Stephenson with Anathem and I was hooked. This book doesn’t get a lot of love it seems, maybe because it’s not Stephenson's usual cyberpunk / near future sci-fi (and maybe because of all the made-up words and history—there’s even an xkcd comic about it). But (SPOILERS) you gotta admire a book that starts like The Name of the Rose and finishes in a nuke-propelled starship.

In the very beginning, there were light bulbs and wiring panels...

I guess you could go back a bit earlier? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_engine#Charles_Babb...

splendid reading, an enlightening essay about society and operating systems as a mediated experience methaphore

Gates worked as a programmer in high school, so he was aware that the practice of selling software was not new. IBM was a long standing company by that point that made money writing software for businesses. The first example of a person making money from machine instructions was Jaquard (1804) who encoded his instructions on punch cards and fed them into weaving machines to create pretty patterns. So graphics programmers came first.

But didn't IBM (and Jaquard as well) include the software with the sale of the hardware to run it?

IBM didn't sell software until the consent decree forced them to, and Jacquard cards (or dobby patterns for that matter) are uncompressed graphics files, not programs to generate graphics algorithmically. Many machines in the 1950s used Williams-tube memory and drove additional visible CRTs from the signals, so every program was a graphics program. But that was a century after Lovelace.

Jacquard and dobby patterns were generally created by employees of the loom owner.

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