Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

> They might use Apple/Microsoft OSes to write letters, play video games, or balance their checkbooks, but they cannot really bring themselves to take these operating systems seriously.

As a pdp11 v7, vax 4.1bsd, 4.2bsd, Cray unicos and Unix 32V user I am slightly bemused by this because to all intents and purposes Darwin is unix

If he means "we feel a bit tawdry using a GUI" well sometimes, yes, except SunView and X10R4 and the blit and gnot and perq are kind of out there. I liked the perq. And Ultrix.

I think Stephenson has kind of walked off the reservation a bit. Even plan9 fanatics use a gui.

"In the beginning was the command line" is better.

View on HN

Neal Stephenson admitted that he had switched to OS X in a 2004 Slashdot interview: https://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-...

"You guessed right: I embraced OS X as soon as it was available and have never looked back. So a lot of 'In the beginning was the command line' is now obsolete. I keep meaning to update it, but if I'm honest with myself, I have to say this is unlikely."

Given that Stephenson didn't stick with CLI himself, the repostings of "In the Beginning was the Command Line" really should have ended long ago.

(As an aside, the interview is worth a read, particularly his response to "In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win?")

That is not surprising, you see the cargo cult in Linux circles about the "UNIX way", when the actual UNIX clones, those that actually descend from AT&T and BSD code linage, never followed it to the letter.

Following it to the letter would be a sign of cargo culting.

Which is exactly what happens in GNU/Linux world when something comes out that doesn't do it, and gets bombarded about not being the "UNIX way".

This is from "In the Beginning was the Command Line"; more specifically it's section 11 of such. So this was written by 1999 at the latest, before Apple had released any consumer Darwin-based operating systems...

> I am slightly bemused by this because to all intents and purposes Darwin is unix

The oldest version of this article in the wayback machine is from 2003, but I see a reference from 2001 here:

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=912937

So I suspect it's from before the introduction of OS X.

The 'article' is just lifted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co...

which was published in 1999

Ah that makes sense, it seemed familiar. Shame it's not credited on the page.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com