Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #61933 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
You may well ask what light cyberpunk maestro Neal Stephenson can shed on the subject of operating systems and interface design. He's better known for his novels: Snow Crash, a dystopian not-too-distant future of avatars, linguistic software viruses and rent-a-nukes; The Diamond Age in which Victorian values come a cropper of nanotechnology; and Cryptonomicon, his 900 page opus spanning the development of hacking from before Bletchley Park to a contemporary data haven in Southeast Asia, complete with an (imaginary, obviously) gay love scene in the woods outside New Haven involving cryptography pioneer Alan Turing.

No one could read a Stephenson novel and not recognise his frighteningly powerful grasp of social and political history, and of technology that underpins all his stories. Read the liner notes on Snow Crash and you'll realise this is a man who probably considers Apple's Human Interface Guidelines to be soothing bedtime reading.

In the Beginning...Was the Command Line gives Stephenson an opportunity to flex his own non-fictional muscles. Part memoir, part developer's history of operating systems, it trawls through CLIs (command line interfaces) such as MS-DOS to GUIs (graphical user interfaces), the then-as now--revolutionary Macintosh OS, and everything since: Windows 98 (note: purist Stephenson doesn't even consider this an OS), Unix and Linux.

By the end of his enlightening, exhaustive elucidation of these and other TLAs, you too may suffer the subject of one of the book's final chapters: "geek fatigue". Not to worry--if there's one thing of which you can be certain it's that Stephenson never takes himself, or his subject, too seriously, and anything that cites Dilbert cartoons and H. G. Wells as source material has got to be a giant step forward. --Liz Bailey

Customer Reviews

An excellent read although somewhat dated.
This is an excellent book, a very entertaining and worthwhile read if you are at all interested in modern computer operating systems.

However, like all computer science books, the technological aspect of it has already dated considerably, reducing its relevance as a survey. This is of course inevitable in such a fast-moving field. I would be very interested to read an updated edition taking into account the current situation in the OS marketplace.

Stephenson primarily contrasts Windows(tm), Linux, MacOS and BeOS. Out of these systems, BeOS is basically dead, MacOS has undergone a sea change (to a considerable extent building on BeOS and Linux), Linux has grown in sophistication and user-friendliness, and Windows is... still basically Windows with some extra knobs on it.

The book should not be ignored, though. The fundamental issue Stephenson comments on - whether it's possible to control complex equipment through simplified interfaces - is never going to disappear. It's also an entertaining read simply for the author's wonderful use of language.

Not vintage Stephenson - a one-sided essay
This book is not a history of operating systems, contrary to what the reviews and synopsis would have you think. Rather it is an essay about the sort of operating systems (e.g. Windows, MacOS, Linux etc.) that Stephenson likes and dislikes.

He clearly prefers the command line interface (where you type commands) to a nice user-friendly interface with icons and flashy graphics. He constantly uses metaphors to explain his ideas (such as Windows is a station-wagon, MacOS is a sedan, Linux is a tank, and the BeOS is a batmobile), though these metaphors are often ill-considered. For example, the above metaphor does not take into account that tanks are hard to drive, as is a command line interface hard to use except to "hackers" like myself.

There is some humour in this book - I utterly failed to find it, though my brother found it hilarious and kept quoting bits. Basically, the book is his reasons for using MacOS instead of Windows, and then switching to Linux. These reasons are not applicable to 90% of computer users, because they cannot use a GUI (graphical user interface like Windows or MacOS) competantly anyway, so would not be able to manage at all in Linux or BeOS.

Stephenson clearly is "the rarest of geniuses", who appreciates complex cultural and social issues that most cannot, as shown through his comments on Disneyland in this book, and basically all of "Cryptonomicon".

Hardened Neal Stephenson fans like myself should probably buy this book to judge for themselves. Anyone interested in computers should also read it, though (like me) they will probably not agree with it. All Mac users should read it to tell them what ignorant fools [sic] they are. Anyone interested in human culture and sociology will probably find some of it interesting. Other than that, you probably won'y like it, or just find it boring.

Very well written, but a bit too short
This is an amazingly fast read, and it has a lot of thought-provoking views. It's just a shame it isn't very thorough and sometimes even superficial. The book covers more or less the entire history of Operating Systems and reads like a rollercoaster ride through computer history.
The book is a very interesting thought excercise, but it feels more like a Wired article that got published in book form. At the low price though, it's a tasty intellectual snack along the road, you can probably finish it in three or four commuter train rides.