In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999)

https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt

by wseqyrku • 8 months ago

188 98 8 months ago

web.stanford.edu

Is this the origin of the classic analogy that Windows is a station wagon, Mac OS is a European luxury sedan, and Linux is a free tank? I had no idea that the author Neal Stephenson came up with that.

The analogy is definitely a bit outdated now, what with Windows 8 then 10 then 11 getting aggressively less user-friendly each year.

kragen3• 7 months ago

Is Microsoft Windows more like a Ford Pinto with an exploding gas tank, a Lada, or what? I can't think of any car that's ever been sold whose design was optimized to spy on its users and trick them into buying to things and agreeing to contracts they didn't want.

The Takata airbags that inflated at random, killing 26 people, seem similarly harmful (if to a far smaller number of people), but that's an unintentional defect. Unlike the recent Windows 11 screw-tightening, Takata responded by recalling the product, not making it explode more frequently.

JoshTriplett• 7 months ago

I can't think of any car that's ever been sold whose design was optimized to spy on its users and trick them into buying to things and agreeing to contracts they didn't want.

I've ridden in people's cars that are still displaying "agree to the terms of service"; I think a number of cars are starting to become far too much like computers.

advael• 7 months ago

From my experience riding in them and news reports I've read, any tesla fits the bill

Sadly, the most reliable signal american tech companies send is that they are primarily concerned with building a surveillance state. Whether this is for the US government or just their own fiefdoms (franchulates?) seems to vary a lot both within and between them, but neither prospect is particularly appealing to me as a prospective customer and/or target

mc323• 7 months ago

like a Ford Pinto with an exploding gas tank"

This bit of libel needs to be put to bed. The Pinto did not have a greater propensity to explode than other "in-class" cars and arguably had a better safety record than Beetles or Corollas of the time. Nader made himself a nice career of this libel, but it does not make it true. Of course, other cars didn't have a "memo" but that's beside the point.

ur-whale• 7 months ago

I can't think of any car that's ever been sold whose design was optimized to spy on its users and trick them into buying to things and agreeing to contracts they didn't want.

Just give it a couple of years.

rusk2• 7 months ago

Windows Vista had suicide doors

bacchusracine• 7 months ago

Don’t forget about the BeOS being the Batmobile!

irishcoffee8• 7 months ago

Apple is a shitty 3-series BMW, windows is a used Lexus that’s been in 3 accidents, and Linux is a 25 year old f250 that’s been a farm truck its whole life.

nullbyte8082• 7 months ago

I'd say Apple is a 50's CHEVROLET CORVETTE. Breaks down less than Windows and has less intrusive technology (like ads, AI, ect.)

askvictor• 7 months ago

Linux is a 25 year old f250 that’s been a farm truck its whole life

... that someone occassionally decides to wrap with a shiny covering to make it look like a luxury SUV. The covering sometimes peels off when travelling on the highway.

samdoesnothing2• 7 months ago

As someone who's owned an f250, I never once had to look up arcane commands to type in a terminal to get it started.

zubairq• 7 months ago

Great stuff. I always love technical fluff about the history and philiosophy of operating systems

themafia• 7 months ago

Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems.

Please. They resold an already existing OS created by another individual. The idea that there was some "vision" here in being an IBM contractor is a total misunderstanding of the history of the time.

homarp2• 7 months ago

I understand this part to be more about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

Nevermark• 7 months ago

The “strange” products they created to sell for money, were implementations of programming languages. When most software was (1) supplied by the large company that sold the large computer it ran on, (2) was written on one of those machines by the people who were going to use it, or (3) was hobby stuff, shared freely between hobbyists.

The latter made sense, since taking and giving back to the community was a natural and fair system. Which served everyone, while obligating no one. And in any case, how would you charge for something with no physical form and that anyone can copy?

ssrc• 7 months ago

Arguably this started in the mainframe world in 1969, with IBM "unbundling" software and services from hardware sales, after the US government launched an antitrust suit against them.

fsckboy4• 7 months ago

what kept Microsoft alive in the post-BASIC pre-OS era was actually sales of the SoftCard, a hardware card which put a Z80 microprocessor into an Apple II so Apple owners could run CP/M software like S-100 machines. It was the brainchild of Paul Allen, and was about the biggest market share CP/M platform there was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-80_SoftCard

irishcoffee8• 7 months ago

Please. They resold an already existing OS created by another individual. The idea that there was some "vision" here in being an IBM contractor is a total misunderstanding of the history of the time.

Imagine how different the world might be if gates’ mom didn’t work at ibm.

zabzonk• 7 months ago

she didn't. she was on a united way charity comittee with an ibm executive

delaminator2• 7 months ago

Or his dad at Planned Parenthood

GMoromisato• 7 months ago

Don't go down this road. It's so tempting to believe that everything is just luck and circumstance. It gives us an excuse to not bother trying. We all have that voice inside that seductively tells us that we don't need to try so hard; that it's all just luck, and we shouldn't waste our energy. This is the equivalent of refusing medical care because "God will provide."

I met Bill Gates a couple of times at Microsoft. He wasn't an average man who got lucky. He was/is a hard-working, extraordinarily brilliant man who got lucky.

I know the playing field is not level. We don't all have an equal chance to be a billionaire. But I do know that most of us have not reached our full potential. Most of us could be better (on whatever dimension you desire) if only we tried harder.

Imagine how different the world might be if we did.

jameshart• 7 months ago

You missed the point. Selling an operating system at all was the innovation, rather than having it just come with the hardware. That the operating system they came up with the crazy idea to sell was someone else’s operating system is just an implementation detail, following the age old pattern of stealing others’ work industrialized decades earlier by Thomas Edison and thus requiring no innovation at all.

fsckboy4• 7 months ago

CP/M was already for sale for years, and the PC DOS that Microsoft bought was modelled after CP/M

homarp2• 7 months ago

previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41084795

gnabgib• 7 months ago

It's an HN favourite, that's just 2024, there's also:

2020 (179 points, 64 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24998305

2019 (148 points, 50 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20684764

2018 (102 points, 13 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16843739

2016 (145 points, 55 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12469797

2008 (24 points, 12 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=408226

dang• 7 months ago

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41084795 - July 2024 (260 comments)

In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314225 - Aug 2023 (2 comments)

In the Beginning Was the Command Line - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29373944 - Nov 2021 (4 comments)

In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24998305 - Nov 2020 (64 comments)

In the beginning was the command line (1999) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20684764 - Aug 2019 (50 comments)

In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16843739 - April 2018 (13 comments)

In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12469797 - Sept 2016 (54 comments)

In the beginning was the command line - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11385647 - March 2016 (1 comment)

In the Beginning was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=408226 - Dec 2008 (12 comments)

In the beginning was the command line by Neil Stephenson - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95912 - Jan 2008 (5 comments)

In the Beginning Was the Command Line - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47566 - Aug 2007 (2 comments)

(Reposts are fine after a year or so, and in the case of perennials like this one, it's good to have a thread every once in a while so newer user cohorts learn what the classics are.)

nullbyte8082• 7 months ago

"Even the hardware that Windows ran on, when compared to the machines put out by Apple, looked like white-trash stuff, and still mostly does."

Still true 25 years later!

1vuio0pswjnm72• 7 months ago

"The cosmic operating system uses a command-line interface."

"Now THAT is a cool operating system, and if such a thing were actually made available on the Internet (for free, of course) every hacker in the world would download it right away and then stay up all night long messing with it, spitting out universes right and left."

At the same time, there will be uncool operating systems designed for data collection, surveillance and ad services

IAmBroom3• 7 months ago

The base units of the cosmos are binary (half-charge, charm, and spin) and trinary (color).

It runs on Assembler.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 7 months ago

CosmOS

s/runs on/is written in/

If it's assembler, then what's the processor architecture

What's it's endianness

tcherasaro• 7 months ago

Classic. Due for another read to see how it’s holding up in the AI era.

qubex4• 7 months ago

Have it in print. Fondly remember BeOS in the second half of the nineties; still have second-generation BeBox. I was amongst those who were dismayed when Apple “didn’t choose Plan B” and instead acquired NeXT (that I also had experience with, and whose hardware and software I adored, but that just didn’t “feel right” for the whole “multimedia convergence” visible on the horizon ahead). Guess I was wrong, but I still dote on my Batmobile, and the interface is so perfectly “nineties zany grunge” in retrospect: as chiselled as Motif but with a define nod to Keith Haring.

Anyway, an awesome and prescient book.

Anathem, Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle… Neal Stephenson is an absolute master of his craft, though he is famous for failing to stick the landings sometimes.

kemiller• 7 months ago

BeOS was so amazing; I ran it for a while on x86 hardware. Ahead of its time. But I always loved NeXT. (I'd go down to the local university computer store to drool over them. The staff all knew me by name.) And now, I carry one around with me everywhere I go. Living in the future...

coolcoder6133• 7 months ago

Have you tried Haiku recently?

qubex4• 7 months ago

Yes, I’ve been watching them and running their builds for… fifteen to twenty years now. It’s gone from an effort to reimplement a fairly prescient OS to basically an exercise in software archeology, since even achieving the project’s goals of a fully compatible reinplentation will be so severely limited compared to modern-day OSes it won’t be in any way ‘competitive’ with what is broadly available now, for free (free Linux tanks now have railguns as artillery, antigravity regulators instead of tracks, are built out of magical titanium foam alloys that can protect better while weighing less… you get the point). They have all the sci-fi tech of the erstwhile Batmobile and are on the lot with the keys in the ignition and a sign that reads “take me”.

hekkle• 7 months ago

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!"

Literally every conversation I have had with people where I have tried to get them to use Linux :').

jmclnx• 7 months ago

How things have changed, late 90s, early 2000 was an exciting in Linux Land. Now, not as much excitement.

fsckboy4• 7 months ago

late 90s Sun and other companies were still selling high end workstations and servers running unix, and Microsoft was trying to dominate the server marekt.

Linux won most all that and now there is no competition; that's why it seems quiet.

Discordian93• 7 months ago

Like the other reply says, Linux already won on the server level where all the hype was 25 years ago. Now it's different but there's a lot of excitement still thaks to Valve's efforts to make gaming viable on Linux and to make ARM/x86 porting easier. Plus there's been a new wave of new users lately thanks to influencers recommending Linux in the wake of Windows 11's horribleness.

bee_rider• 7 months ago

We had a human/computer interface a hundred years before we had computers. When computers came into being around the time of the Second World War, humans, quite naturally, communicated with them by simply grafting them on to the already-existing technologies for translating letters into bits and vice versa: teletypes and punch card machines.

Is this… right?

I thought some of the earliest mechanical computers (as opposed to human computers) that had much real uptake were “fire control computers,” for things like naval guns (for example). You move around dials and cranks to put the measurements in. I’d call this essentially graphical… it isn’t a series of text based commands that you issue, but a collection of intuitive UI elements, each of which is used to communicate a particular piece of data to the computer. Of course the GUI of the past was made of gages and levers instead of pixels, but that’s just an implementation detail.

I much prefer the command line to a gui, but I think we should call it what it is: an improvement. A much more precise and repeatable way of talking to the computer, in comparison to cranking cranks and poking dials. And a general, endlessly flexible channel that can represent basically any type of information, at the cost of not necessary being intuitive or glance-able.

mjevans• 7 months ago

In this context I believe 'computer' refers to only general purpose computing devices, not fixed function calculation machines.

In some sense, early player pianos (IIRC with holes in paper that controlled key presses) weren't computers, but were a related precursor technology / infrastructure.

kragen3• 7 months ago

This is a terminological confusion. The "computers" you're describing gave their name to the universal symbol manipulators we now call "computers" because, historically, the universal symbol manipulators were originally funded to perform mathematical calculations. They don't have much else in common. The "computers" that Stephenson is talking about are the universal symbol manipulators, the smallest and most limited of which can boot Linux: https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=35.%20Linux4004

btilly2• 7 months ago

This is absolutely right.

The teletype system was invented shortly after 1900. It was in widespread commercial use by the 1920s, for sending text over telegraph wires.

The US government began using punch card machines to do the census in 1890. They were named Hollerith machines. Hollerith is one of the companies that later became IBM. When they entered into electronic computers, their prime market was their own customers who were already using their punch card machines for things like accounting and payroll. For backwards compatibility, they kept the format the same!

Punch cards themselves date back to the early very 1800s, where they were introduced for the Jacquard loom. With the cards providing programmable instructions for fabric design.

It is worth noting that Hollerith was not the first place to try to repurpose punch cards to computation. That honor goes to Babbage's analytical machine (which admittedly was not actually completed).

Basically everything in technology has a far longer and richer history than people realize. I could go on for a while about this...

jazzyjackson• 7 months ago

Still, one might distinguish from batch computing and interactive. Sending commands via teletype didn't really happen until well after interactive TUIs -- the text based system relating to punch cards was a separate machine that prepared cards for calculation in a separate batch process.

Gun Fire Control might be more interactive and predates ENIAC (which was, of course, initially used to calculate artillery trajectory). ENIAC's user interface was plugging wires from outputs to inputs same as telephone operators connecting calls. Hardly interactive.

I don't think we get to REPL/TUI like features until 1960s, you've got Sutherland's Sketchpad with a CRT and lightpen representing GUI and LISP REPL via Teletype just before it 1959ish (actually I'm trying to find an old video I saw demo'ing LISP or APL being used interactively by teletype, it's the earliest kind of terminal I've seen)

kmeisthax4• 7 months ago

I absolutely love this article, but every time I see it do the rounds online I have to nitpick at least one thing from it. Last time it was the anecdote about MPW[0], and today I'm going to nitpick the car metaphor.

The metaphors for Windows and MacOS are swapped. Windows' technical underpinnings were - from the start - way better than Apple's. Microsoft actually bothered to copy everything from XEROX PARC, albeit poorly, while Apple saw the fancy windows-and-desktop UI and ignored the object system underpinning it. This isn't me making a jab at Apple - Jobs himself said it when he was at NeXT. Windows 95 and NT also both brought memory protection to the existing Windows API. Apple had spent several years trying and failing to build a memory protected Mac OS before just giving up and buying NeXT.

The correct metaphors are:

- Someone working at the phone company secretly designs a tram (UNIX). They're actually prohibited from selling vehicles, but they license the design under the table to a bunch of universities. A bunch of tram manufacturers make trams based off the phone company design.

- A wheel factory (Microsoft) sells wheels for bicycles. Bicycle dealerships crop up everywhere using their wheels. Even the railroads (IBM) want to get in on it, and they ship a terrible bike that everyone copies because it's the railway bike.

- Phone company designed trams are really popular and every city has like five of them. Except they keep breaking down and all the control cabs are just slightly different, so it pisses off the operators. Some kids at Berkeley try to make their own standard tram design (BSD) but they get sued by the phone company and nobody uses it.

- A car dealership (XEROX) moves in. They sell SUVs (Xerox STAR). They cost $100k each, and they only sell them in huge fleets to big corporations because XEROX wants to compete with the railroad. Nobody buys them and they leave town, but not before giving a demo of their tech to the last bicycle dealer (Apple) not using the railway design.

- The bicycle dealership decides to build their own SUV (Lisa) and a moped (Mac). The SUV is a huge flop while the moped is a minor success. Their CEO gets fired by the board and starts a trucking company (NeXT).

- A homeless man that lives on public transit and thinks vehicles should be free starts working on his own tram (GNU), but he overengineers the engine (Hurd) and it doesn't work at all. Still, he's not being sued by the phone company, so people start putting his parts into their trams anyway.

- The wheel factory learned how to make a moped from selling wheels to the moped dealer. So they sell their own moped upgrade kit (Windows). It works with any bicycle, but it looks like shit, even though it has the same power as an SUV engine.

- The wheel factory also starts work on a joint venture with the local railroad to produce their own trucks (OS/2). They can't agree on anything and divorce after a few years.

- Turns out mopeds suck! They break down constantly and need an oil change every 400 miles. The moped dealer starts work on a station wagon (Copland). A prototype is produced that's about as elegant as The Homer. It is unceremoniously cancelled.

- The wheel factory also has problems with their moped kits breaking down, but since they sold a lot more of them, they're the ones getting the reputation of selling an unreliable vehicle. They decide to design a truck of their own (Windows NT) and a car made out of moped parts (Windows 95) and sell the design to all the bicycle (now car) dealers.

- The moped company is ridiculed by the car dealers and nobody buys their elegantly designed mopeds. They wind up buying the trucking company.

- Someone in Finland designs an electric motor (Linux) that happens to fit in the homeless guy's tram. People hail this as a revolution in public transport, even though cities are full of NIMBYs who tore down the tramways and put in buses that ride worse and get delayed in traffic.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24998305

saghm• 7 months ago

A homeless man that lives on public transit and thinks vehicles should be free starts working on his own tram (GNU), but he overengineers the engine (Hurd) and it doesn't work at all. Still, he's not being sued by the phone company, so people start putting his parts into their trams anyway.
Someone in Finland designs an electric motor (Linux) that happens to fit in the homeless guy's tram. People hail this as a revolution in public transport, even though cities are full of NIMBYs who tore down the tramways and put in buses that ride worse and get delayed in traffic.

It's so easy to forget just how strange the actual history seems when zoomed out a bit. It sounds so absurd that this is the story of the OS I'm writing this comment on, but yet here I am doing it!

kmeisthax4• 7 months ago

Don't forget that the reason why GNU won out over BSD is that the homeless man had already found out the hard way not to start off with someone else's code even if you intend to change all of it. Remember Gosling[0] EMACS?

[0] Funnily enough, James Gosling also made Java, which is why I suspect the FSF was so ready to pounce on "the Java trap".

lproven5• 7 months ago

This seems strangely parochial to me. It reads a little like an American who knows San Francisco and so knows about trams has tried to imagine what a European city and country is like, and hasn't quite made the pieces fit together.

It has what I guess are American references that are meaningless to me. What is or was The Homer? In what universe are mopeds some sort of unsuccessful trial? Much of Asia has travelled by mopeds for ~75 years now; the Honda C90 is the best-selling motor vehicle of all time, and it's not even close.

As a super-extended metaphor for computing, I don't think the timeline fits together: it has Xerox, Apple, and IBM in the wrong order, but I'd find that hard to nail down. There was overlap, obviously.

It feels to me like the big influences are squeezed in, but not the smaller ones -- possibly because they mostly aren't American and don't show up on American radar. Wirth and Pascal/Modula-2/Oberon, the Lilith and Ceres; Psion; Acorn; other Apple efforts notably the Newton and things it inspired like Palm; Symbolics and InterLisp.

Nice effort. I respect the work that went into it, but it doesn't fix Stephenson's effort -- it over-extends it until it snaps, then tapes the bits together and tries again.

gschizas• 7 months ago

What is or was The Homer?

It's a reference to a Simpsons episode where Homer Simpson designs a car, and it's supremely hideous: https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/The_Homer

kmeisthax4• 7 months ago

If I mentioned every operating system that Apple was involved in, my original post would be twice as long. Acorn, Psion, Newton, and Palm in particular are historically relevant today[0] but have no bearing on what Neal Stephenson was writing about. He was talking exclusively about desktop operating systems running on personal computers. That's where I drew the line. If you didn't ship something that ran on a normal PC[1], you didn't make the cut.

Ok, I also swapped out Be for NeXT, mainly because NeXT was the one that actually got bought by Apple and ultimately had a lot more influence.

Xerox, Apple, and IBM were all releasing products concurrently to one another, so I kinda just had to pick a (wrong) order and stick with it.

I wasn't trying to make a ding at mopeds, I was trying to make a ding at the classic Mac OS. I guess if you want to fix that metaphor, the classic Mac OS was like a nice moped that had a bunch of shit added onto it until it became a really unstable but nice-looking car, while Microsoft just made a real car that looks like dogwater. If that still feels too American, well, I'm sorry but Neil started with a car metaphor, and I've already exhausted my permitted number of dings at American car centric urban design with the Linux bit.

The Homer is a Simpsons reference. The joke is that Homer Simpson designed a car in almost the same way that managers decided what features shipped in Copland.

[0] If this was a mobile OS discussion, I'd be dropping IBM, UNIX, and XEROX from the discussion to make way for Psion, Newton, and Palm. Microsoft would be pared down to "Well around the same time they were shipping real desktop OSes they also shipped Windows CE and Windows Mobile".

But even then, I almost feel like mentioning the actual inventors of the PDA is overindulgence, because absolutely none of those companies survived the iPhone. Microsoft didn't survive iPhone. Nobody survived iPhone, except Android, and that's only because Android had enough Google money backing them to pivot to an iPhone-like design. Even flipphones run Android now (or KaiOS). It's way more stark and bleak a landscape for innovation than desktop was in 1999 when Windows was king.

[1] OK, yes, both early Mac OS and early Windows were built in Pascal, not C. But neither of those are operating systems, and normal users would not be able to tell if their software was written in one or the other unless it crashes.

sho• 7 months ago

Timely. In the age of AI, the command line is more relevant than ever..

wodow• 7 months ago

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co... for how Stephenson considered the essay obsolete five years later.

theandrewbailey• 7 months ago

There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one day began selling motorized vehicles--expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery.

I know Neal said the essay was quickly obsolete, especially in regards to Mac, but I'll always remember this reference about hermetically sealed Apple products. To this day, Apple doesn't want anyone to know how their products work, or how to fix them, to the point where upgrading or expanding internal hardware is mostly impossible (no M-series Mac Pro discrete GPUs?). Even after 25 years, some things never change.

ogogmad2• 7 months ago

Given that LLMs can make their own calls to the command line, I think it's obsolete ten times over. Much of the learning curve - and therefore most of the downside from CLIs, is now gone. A person can now learn only the most basic facts about operating systems - and let the AI handle the rest. Given all of that, I'm not sure where the world of software and IT is heading.

There's a danger though that people won't even learn the basics.

anthk2• 7 months ago

A) LLM's caused disasters because juniors have no clue on the context of the applying commands.

B) With the current enshittification, your comment it's the obsolete one. 100 times over. Why? Enjoy your crappy iOS'ified OS with a maze of dependencies (Python3 for instance), SIP and updates breaking everything.

C) If any, the newbies are the doomed ones, as they don't know anything about computers. Solaris SMF commands (or AIX ones) blindly applied ro RHEL systems? Why not?

Fnoord2• 7 months ago

I remember this being discussed at Slashdot, with the author replying, back in the days. Predecessor of Reddit AMA, it was probably just called Q&A.

In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999)

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