In the Beginning was the Command Line
    
    by Neal Stephenson
    
    
    About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders
    of Apple, came up with 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
    and received the credit they deserved for being daring
    visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and
    Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more
    fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This
    was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A
    computer at least had some sort of physical reality to
    it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it
    in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no
    tangible incarnation 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
    very 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 zeroes. Even those
    few who actually understood what a computer operating
    system 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 ever be
    (in the parlance of high-tech) "productized."
    
    Yet now the company that Gates and Allen founded is
    selling operating systems like Gillette sells razor
    blades. New releases of operating systems are launched
    as if they were Hollywood blockbusters, with celebrity
    endorsements, talk show appearances, and world tours. The
    market for them is vast enough 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 opinions about their relative
    merits. It is commonly understood, even by technically
    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 mistake,
    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? Shipping? Oil? No, operating
    systems. Item: the Department of Justice is tackling
    Microsoft's supposed OS monopoly with legal tools that
    were invented to restrain the power of Nineteenth-Century
    robber barons. Item: a woman friend 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 intelligent 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; but 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 not 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
    compared to the technical reviews you can find in PC
    magazines. But ever since 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
    would 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 his face; to his worried
    passengers, he was a madman, stalling and backfiring
    around Ames, Iowa and eating the dust of rusty Gremlins
    and Pintos, but in 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 to 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 your
    hands) just ask anyone who owns a Macintosh and who, on
    those grounds, imagines him- or herself to be a member of
    an oppressed minority group.
    
    The other, somewhat subtler point, was that interface
    is very important. Sure, the MGB was a lousy car in
    almost every way that counted: balky, unreliable,
    underpowered. But it was fun to drive. It was
    responsive. Every pebble on the road was felt in the
    bones, every nuance in the pavement transmitted 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 numbers into a spreadsheet. But to the driver it
    was an experience. For a short time he was extending his
    body and his senses into a larger realm, and doing 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. One 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,
    but they worked, and when they broke you could easily fix
    them.
    
    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.
    
    The big dealership responded by rushing a moped upgrade
    kit (the original Windows) onto the market. This was
    a Rube Goldberg contraption that, when bolted onto a
    three-speed bicycle, enabled it to keep up, just barely,
    with Apple-cars. The users had to wear goggles and were
    always picking bugs out of 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 worker housing block,
    it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous
    success. 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 changed. The smaller dealership continues
    to sell sleek Euro-styled sedans and to 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 gotten 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 designed,
    more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable
    as anything else 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 domes 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; these 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 they 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 ordinary streets, and use no more fuel
    than a subcompact car. These tanks are being 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 who 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 off-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 only to turn up their noses at the
    philistines going to buy the station wagons and ORVs. If
    they even notice the people on the opposite side of the
    road, selling the cheaper, technically superior vehicles,
    these customers deride them cranks and half-wits.
    
    The Batmobile outlet sells a few vehicles to the occasional
    car nut who wants a second vehicle to go with his station
    wagon, but seems to accept, at least 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 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!"
    
    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 initial pang of dread that this essay was
    about to turn into a tedious, codgerly reminiscence about
    how tough we had it back in the old days; rest assured that
    I am actually positioning my pieces on the chessboard, as
    it were, in preparation to make a point about truly hip and
    up-to-the minute topics like Open Source Software). The
    teletype was exactly the same sort of machine that had
    been used, for decades, to send and receive telegrams. It
    was basically a loud typewriter that could only produce
    UPPERCASE LETTERS. Mounted 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 Iowa State University mainframe across
    town, you would pick up the phone, dial the computer's
    number, listen for strange noises, and then slam the
    handset down into the rubber cups. If your aim was true,
    one would wrap its neoprene lips around the earpiece and
    the other around the mouthpiece, consummating a kind of
    informational soixante-neuf.  The teletype would shudder
    as it was possessed by the spirit of the distant mainframe,
    and begin to hammer out cryptic messages.
    
    Since computer time was a scarce resource, we used a
    sort of batch processing 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 programs. 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 same 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 paper 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 sort of semi-affectionate practical joke. The image
    of this man sitting there, gripped in the opening stages
    of an atavistic fight-or-flight reaction, with millions of
    bits (megabytes) sifting down out of his hair and into his
    nostrils and mouth, his face gradually turning purple as
    he built up to an explosion, 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 phases, 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 computer 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 informational
    cordon sanitaire (three miles of snowdrifts) to school and
    type those letters into a machine--not a computer--which
    would convert the symbols 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
    university mainframe, which would (4) do arithmetic on
    them and send different numbers back to the teletype. (5)
    The teletype would convert these numbers back into letters
    and hammer them out on a page and (6) I, watching, would
    construe 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 as meaningful
    symbols. But this distinction is now being blurred,
    or at least complicated, by the advent of modern
    operating systems that use, and frequently abuse,
    the power of metaphor to make computers accessible to a
    larger 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, and 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 interfaces like the MacOS or
    Windows--which is to say, almost everyone who has ever used
    a computer--may have been startled, or at least bemused, to
    hear about the telegraph machine that I used to communicate
    with a computer in 1973. 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 more amenable than others to being expressed
    as strings of symbols. Written language is the easiest
    of all, because, of course, it consists of strings of
    symbols to begin with. If the symbols happen to belong
    to a phonetic alphabet (as opposed to, say, ideograms),
    converting them into bits is a trivial procedure, and one
    that was nailed, technologically, in the early nineteenth
    century, with the introduction of Morse code and other
    forms of telegraphy.
    
    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.
    
    These embodied two fundamentally different approaches
    to computing. When you 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
    do batch processing with a teletype, as I have already
    described, by using the 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
    unaware 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 in a line and
    hit the return key. The teletype would send that line
    to the computer, 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 retroactively dubbed the Command
    Line Interface.
    
    When I moved on to college, I did my computing in large,
    stifling rooms where scores of students would sit in front
    of slightly updated versions of the 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 is, mainframes were
    still mainframes, but they were better at communicating
    with a large number of terminals at once. Consequently,
    it was no longer necessary 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 even knew it existed. We were all off the Batch,
    and on the Command Line, interface 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 of these glorified teletypes, and
    miles of paper shuddered through their platens. Almost
    all of this paper was thrown away or recycled without
    ever having been touched by ink--an ecological atrocity
    so glaring that those machines soon replaced by video
    terminals--so-called "glass teletypes"--which were quieter
    and didn't waste paper. Again, though, from the computer's
    point of view these were indistinguishable from World War
    II-era teletype machines. In effect we still used Victorian
    technology to communicate with computers 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 systems 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 software is to figure out how
    to take the information that is being worked with (in a
    graphics program, an image; in a spreadsheet, a grid of
    numbers) and turn it into a linear string of bytes. These
    strings of bytes are commonly called files or (somewhat
    more hiply) streams. They are to telegrams what 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 Raider, your digitized voice
    mail messages, faxes, and word processing documents
    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, visit a site, and then select the
    View/Document Source menu item. You will get a bunch of
    computer code that looks something like this:
    
    <html> 
    
    <head> 
    
    <title>Shift Online</title> 
    <meta name="DESCRIPTION" 
    content="This is Shift Online,...."> 
    <meta name="KEYWORDS" 
    content="Shift Online's homepage, homepage of Shift Online, Shift Magazine, Shift TV, 
             Behaviour, Behaviour, Shift Online, Shift Magazine, ..."> 
    
    </head> 
    
    <frameset rows="80, *" frameborder="0" framespacing="0" 
    border="0"> 
        <frame name="top" src="../html/core_top.html" noresize 
        scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" 
        frameborder="0" framespacing="0"> 
    
        <frame name="bottom" src="core_java.html" noresize 
        scrolling="yes" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" 
        frameborder="0" framespacing="0"> 
    </frameset> 
      
    
    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 represent, 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 and 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 machine 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 the dirt from home plate." and so
    on. When the cryptogram on the paper tape announced a base
    hit, he would whack the edge of the table with a pencil,
    creating a little sound effect, and describe the arc of
    the ball as if he could actually see it. His listeners,
    many of whom presumably thought that Reagan was actually
    at the ballpark watching the game, would reconstruct the
    scene 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 same is true of
    Graphical User Interfaces in general.
    
    So an OS is a stack of metaphors and abstractions that
    stands between you and the telegrams, and embodying various
    tricks the programmer used to convert the information
    you're working with--be it images, e-mail messages,
    movies, 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, though, our interaction
    with the machine is heavily mediated. Everything we do is
    interpreted and translated time and again as it works its
    way down through all of the metaphors and abstractions.
    
    The Macintosh OS was a revolution in both the good and bad
    senses of that word. Obviously it was true that command
    line interfaces were not for everyone, 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 those sorts of people constituted an incomparably
    vaster market. It was clear the 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 files as linear streams of bytes anymore, vive la
    revolution, let's see how far we can take this!" No command
    line interface was available on the Macintosh; you talked
    to it with the mouse, or not at all. This was a statement
    of sorts, a credential of revolutionary purity. It seemed
    that the designers of the Mac intended to sweep Command
    Line Interfaces into the dustbin of history.
    
    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--coincidentally, the son of
    the MGB owner--showed me a Macintosh running MacPaint,
    the revolutionary drawing program. It ended in July of
    1995 when I tried to save a big important file on my
    Macintosh Powerbook and instead instead of doing so, it
    annihilated the data so thoroughly that two different disk
    crash 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 his car.
    
    The introduction of the Mac triggered a sort of holy
    war in the computer world. Were GUIs a brilliant design
    innovation that made computers more human-centered and
    therefore accessible to the masses, leading us toward an
    unprecedented revolution in human society, or an insulting
    bit of audiovisual gimcrackery dreamed up by flaky Bay
    Area hacker types that stripped computers of their power
    and flexibility and turned the noble and serious work of
    computing 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 endorsed the idea of
    GUIs by coming out with the first Windows. At this point,
    command-line partisans were relegated to the status of
    silly old grouches, and a new conflict was touched off,
    between users of MacOS and users of Windows.
    
    There was plenty to argue about. The first Macintoshes
    looked different from other PCs even when they were
    turned off: they consisted of one box containing 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, like 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 unit, or CPU, to
    a far greater extent than is the case with command-line
    interfaces, which until recently didn't even know that
    they weren't just talking to teletypes.
    
    This distinction was of a technical and abstract nature,
    but it became clearer when the machine crashed (it
    is commonly the case with technologies that 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
    random 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; the 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 and wrote gibberish into the bitmap,
    the result was something that looked vaguely like static
    on a broken television set--a "snow crash."
    
    And even after the introduction of Windows, the underlying
    differences endured; when a Windows machine got into
    trouble, the old command-line interface would fall down
    over the GUI like an asbestos fire curtain sealing off
    the proscenium of a burning opera. When a Macintosh got
    into trouble it presented you with a cartoon of a bomb,
    which was funny the first time you saw it.
    
    And these were by no means superficial differences. The
    reversion of Windows 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 underneath 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 willingness, almost an eagerness, to be duped.
    
    Anyway, a Macintosh had to switch individual bits in the
    memory chips on the 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 integrated
    whole--hence the single, hermetically sealed case that
    made the Macintosh 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 pay money to look at
    either. Microsoft's complete disregard for aesthetics
    gave all of us Mac-lovers plenty of opportunities to look
    down our noses at them. 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
    knew and appreciated computers (hackers, in Steven Levy's
    non-pejorative sense of that word) and in a few other
    niches such as professional musicians, graphic artists and
    schoolteachers, the Macintosh, for a while, was simply
    the 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 established that endures to this day:
    people dislike Microsoft, which is okay; but they dislike
    it for reasons that are poorly considered, and in the end,
    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 stockholders) in order to be in the bit business. As
    an officer of that corporation, Bill Gates has one
    responsibility only, which is to maximize return on
    investment. He has done this incredibly well. Any actions
    taken in the world by Microsoft-any software released by
    them, for example--are basically 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 (respectively) philistines or
    half-wits. It is because Microsoft's excellent management
    has figured out that they can make more money for their
    stockholders by releasing 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
    annoying as watching Apple inscrutably and relentlessly
    destroy itself.
    
    Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on
    the Net, and it blends two strains: resentful people who
    feel Microsoft is too powerful, and disdainful 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 intelligentsia, because of
    their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments. Microsoft 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 neatly: when you started up the program
    you were treated to a picture of an expensive 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, and 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've 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 resting on top of a file folder.
    
    These aesthetic gaffes give one an almost uncontrollable
    urge to make fun of Microsoft, but again, it is all beside
    the point--if Microsoft had done focus group testing of
    possible alternative graphics, they probably would have
    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 bear the
    brunt of setting up and maintaining home computers, can
    probably relate 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 distribute, one he'd thought of the idea. The
    hard part was selling it--reassuring customers that they
    were actually getting something in return for their money.
    
    Anyone who has ever bought a piece of software in a
    store has had the curiously deflating experience of
    taking the bright shrink-wrapped box home, tearing it
    open, finding that it's 95 percent air, throwing away
    all the little cards, party favors, and bits of trash,
    and loading the disk into the computer. The end result
    (after you've lost the disk) is nothing except some images
    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 instead. 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 Gates made it work anyway. He didn't
    make it work by selling the best software 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, rattling station wagons. Anyone who doesn't
    own one feels a little weird, and wonders, in spite of
    himself, whether it might not be time to cease resistance
    and buy one; anyone who does, feels confident that he has
    acquired some meaningful possession, even on those days
    when the vehicle is up on a lift in an auto repair shop.
    
    All of this is perfectly congruent with membership in
    the bourgeoisie, which is as much a mental, as a material
    state. And it explains why Microsoft is regularly attacked,
    on the Net, from both sides. People who are inclined to
    feel poor and oppressed construe everything Microsoft does
    as some sinister Orwellian plot. People who like to think
    of themselves as intelligent and 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
    they are going to go on being tacky, and rich, and happy,
    forever. Microsoft therefore bears the same relationship
    to the Silicon Valley elite as the Beverly 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 be talking like a
    hillbilly and wearing bib overalls, and he's still going
    to be a lot richer than Mr. Drysdale.
    
    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. The reason 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 run MacOS, whereas Windows-compatible
    hardware came out of a free market. The free market seems
    to have decided that people will not pay for cool-looking
    computers; PC hardware makers who hire designers to make
    their stuff look distinctive get their clocks cleaned
    by Taiwanese clone makers punching out 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 and simply pass the higher prices on to
    their besotted consumers, like me. Only last week (I am
    writing this sentence in early Jan. 1999) the technology
    sections of all the newspapers were filled with adulatory
    press coverage of how Apple had released the iMac in
    several happenin' new colors like Blueberry 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 them, before
    subsequently putting them out of business. Macintosh
    hardware was, consequently, expensive. You didn't open it
    up and fool around with it because doing so would void the
    warranty. In fact the first Mac was specifically designed
    to be difficult to open--you needed a kit of exotic tools,
    which 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 always had a certain
    disreputable air about them, like pitches for lock-picking
    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 enough
    to make an OS that works well on one specific piece of
    hardware, designed 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
    International Date Line, is very difficult, and accounts
    for much of the troubles people have using Windows.
    
    THE FINANCIAL EXPLANATION is that Apple, unlike Microsoft,
    is and always has been a hardware company. It simply
    depends on revenue from selling hardware, 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 interest and ethical
    turpitude: (1) Geographically I am a Seattleite, of
    a Saturnine 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) Chronologically I am a
    post-Baby Boomer. I feel that way, at least, because I
    never experienced 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 remove it was possible to glean
    certain patterns, and one that recurred as regularly as
    an urban legend was the one about how someone would move
    into a commune 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 service 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, because it is completely at odds with
    their corporate image. Weren't these the guys who aired
    the famous Super Bowl ads showing suited, blindfolded
    executives 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 and other offbeat
    rebels?
    
    It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they
    have been able to plant 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 campaigns and, perhaps, to a certain
    amount of wishful thinking in the minds of people 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 checks to good ad agencies, you
    can plant a corporate image in the minds of intelligent
    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 give a
    damn about having a slick image, any more then Dick Nixon
    did. "I want 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 partisans 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 their money,
    engaging in a respectable business transaction).
    
    In any event, as of 1987, both MacOS and Windows were out
    on the market, running 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 explain when we get to
    Linux. The upshot is that millions of people got accustomed
    to using GUIs in one form or another. By doing so, they
    made Apple/Microsoft a lot of money. The fortunes of many
    people have become bound up with the ability of these
    companies to continue selling products whose salability
    is very much open to question.
    
    
    HONEY-POT, TAR-PIT, WHATEVER
    
    
    When Gates and Allen invented the idea of selling software,
    they ran into criticism from both hackers and sober-sided
    businesspeople. Hackers understood 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 own. Accustomed to selling toasters and
    insurance policies, they naturally had a difficult time
    understanding how a long collection of ones and zeroes
    could 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-hacker as it were,
    was and is Richard Stallman, who became so annoyed with
    the 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 Software 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, because GNU most certainly IS Unix,. Because of
    trademark concerns ("Unix" is trademarked by AT&T) they
    simply could not claim that it was Unix, and so, just to
    be extra safe, they claimed that it wasn't. Notwithstanding
    the incomparable 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 perfectly sound and completely doable. It has
    been done many times. It is inherent in the very nature
    of operating systems.
    
    Operating systems are not strictly necessary. There is no
    reason why a sufficiently dedicated coder could not start
    from nothing with every project and write fresh code to
    handle such basic, low-level operations as controlling
    the read/write heads on the disk drives and lighting up
    pixels on the screen. The very first computers had to be
    programmed in this way. But since nearly every program
    needs to carry out those same basic operations, this
    approach 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 how to write computer
    programs is to generalize, generalize, generalize. To make
    their code as modular and flexible as possible, breaking
    large problems down into small subroutines that can be used
    over and over again in different contexts. Consequently,
    the development of operating systems, despite being
    technically unnecessary, was inevitable. Because at its
    heart, an operating system is nothing more than a library
    containing the most commonly used 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 terms. It goes against the whole point
    of having an operating system. And it is impossible to
    keep them secret anyway. The source code--the original
    lines of text written by the programmers--can be kept
    secret. But an OS as a whole is a collection of small
    subroutines that do very specific, very clearly defined
    jobs. Exactly what those subroutines do has to be made
    public, quite explicitly and exactly, or else the OS is
    completely useless to programmers; they can't make use
    of those subroutines if they don't have a complete and
    perfect understanding of what the subroutines do.
    
    The only thing that isn't made public is exactly how the
    subroutines do what they do. But once you know what a
    subroutine does, it's generally quite easy (if you are
    a hacker) to write one of your own that does exactly the
    same 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 to write. And the vendors of commercial
    OSes have already decided, and published 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,
    another 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 free 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 completely functional Windows OS has been recreated
    inside of Unix, like a ship 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
    sold 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 traditional (pre-GUI) sense of
    that phrase is now so cheap and common that it's literally
    free. Not only could Gates and Allen not sell MS-DOS
    today, they could not even give it away, because much
    more powerful OSes are already being 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 that 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 the dump, or
    strip it for parts. It is the fate of manufactured goods
    to slowly 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 Microsoft Word--are an area
    where innovation brings real, direct, tangible benefits to
    users. The innovations might be new technology straight
    from the research department, or they might be in the
    category of bells and whistles, 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 purely
    technological standpoint. Microsoft's OSes do have their
    problems, sure, but they are vastly better than they used
    to be, and they are adequate for most people.
    
    Why, then, do I say that Microsoft is not such a great
    operating systems company? Because the very nature of
    operating systems is such that it is senseless for them
    to be developed and owned by a specific company. It's
    a thankless job to begin with. Applications create
    possibilities for millions of credulous users, whereas
    OSes impose limitations on thousands of grumpy coders,
    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
    hacked 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 to 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 booster 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 selling
    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 that most of the world's computer users ended
    up owning cheaper hardware. But cheap hardware couldn't
    run MacOS, and so these people switched to Windows.
    
    Replace "hardware" with "operating systems," and "Apple"
    with "Microsoft" and you can see the same thing about to
    happen all over again. Microsoft dominates the OS market,
    which makes them money and seems like a great idea for
    now. But cheaper and better OSes are available, and they
    are growingly popular 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 owning these
    cheaper OSes. But these OSes do not, for the time being,
    run any Microsoft 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 stand now, Microsoft's
    applications division loses a customer too. This is not
    such a big deal as long as almost everyone uses Microsoft
    OSes. But as soon 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-compile its applications to run
    under other OSes. But this strategy goes against most
    normal corporate instincts. Again the case of Apple is
    instructive. 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 product line. But this only had the effect of making
    their OS more dependent on 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 corporate instincts will tell them to
    pile more new features into their operating systems, and
    then re-jigger their software applications to exploit those
    special features. But this will only have the effect of
    making their applications 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 know 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 least
    for a little while.
    
    Accordingly, most of the remainder of this essay will be
    about those two topics.
    
    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. This 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 part of the OSes that
    they belong to--and they are by far the largest part, and
    by far the most expensive and difficult part to create.
    
    There are only two ways to sell a product: price and
    features. When OSes are free, OS companies cannot compete
    on price, and so they compete on features. 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 easy to get free browsers, just as to
    get free OSes. If browsers are free, and OSes are free,
    it would seem that there is no way to make money from
    browsers or OSes. But if you can integrate a browser into
    the OS and thereby imbue both of them with new features,
    you have a salable product.
    
    Setting aside, for the moment, the fact that this makes
    government anti-trust 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 technological trend that comes down the pike
    ought to be used as a crutch to maintain the OS's dominant
    position. Confronted with the Web phenomenon, Microsoft
    had to develop a really good web browser, and they did. But
    then they had a choice: they could have made that browser
    work on many different OSes, which would give Microsoft
    a strong position in the Internet world no matter what
    happened to their OS market share. Or they could make the
    browser one with 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 that 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 drag 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 radioactive
    empty space above. Companies that sell OSes exist in a
    sort of technosphere. Underneath is technology that has
    already become free. Above is technology that has yet
    to be developed, or that is too crazy and speculative
    to be productized just yet. Like the Earth's biosphere,
    the technosphere is very 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, recent 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 become fossilized
    there too, and in time some more advanced organism will
    become fossilized on top of you.
    
    The fossil record--the La Brea Tar Pit--of software
    technology is the Internet. Anything that shows up
    there is free for the taking (possibly illegal, but
    free). Executives at companies like Microsoft must get used
    to the experience--unthinkable in other industries--of
    throwing millions of dollars into the development of new
    technologies, such as Web browsers, and then seeing 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 products they can keep one step ahead of the
    fossilization process, but on certain days they must feel
    like mammoths caught at La Brea, using all their energies
    to pull their feet, over and over again, out of the sucking
    hot tar that 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 trampling 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, these companies will forget about what
    lies above the biosphere: the realm of new technology. In
    other words, they must hang onto their primitive weapons
    and crude competitive instincts, but also evolve powerful
    brains. This appears to be what Microsoft is doing with its
    research division, which has been hiring smart people right
    and left (Here I should mention that although I know, and
    socialize with, several people in that company's research
    division, we never talk about business issues and I have
    little to no idea what the hell they are up to. I have
    learned much more about Microsoft by using the 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 between different markets. It is spatial, in
    other words, and hinges on the arbitrageur knowing what
    is going on simultaneously in different places. Microsoft
    is making money by taking advantage of differences in the
    price of technology in different times. Temporal arbitrage,
    if I may coin a phrase, hinges on the arbitrageur knowing
    what technologies people will pay money for next year, and
    how soon afterwards those same technologies will become
    free. 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 time
    in a given place.
    
    So Apple/Microsoft shower new features upon their users
    almost daily, in the hopes that a steady stream of
    genuine technical innovations, combined with the "I want
    to believe" phenomenon, will prevent their customers from
    looking 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 Microsoft is addicted to
    OSes as Apple is to hardware, then they will bet the whole
    farm on their OSes, and tie all of their new applications
    and technologies 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 the
    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 with the following tableau vivant: near the
    entrance a young couple were standing 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 makeup off the display and piled them in. Since then
    I've always thought of that man as the personification of
    an interesting human tendency: not only are 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 dazzlement: to pay money for a theme park ride,
    vote for a guy who's obviously lying 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 Magic Kingdom, walking up Main Street
    USA. This is a perfect gingerbready Victorian 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 camcorder. It was one of the new breed of
    camcorders where instead of peering through 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 obstructed his view. Rather than
    go see a real small town for free, he had paid money 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 not going to keep pounding it into
    the ground. I'm not even going to make snotty comments
    about it--after all, I was at Disney World as a paying
    customer. 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. If 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 attraction, slated to open in March 1999, called
    the Maharajah Jungle Trek. It was open for sneak previews
    when I was there. This is a complete stone-by-stone
    reproduction of a hypothetical ruin in the jungles of
    India. According to its backstory, it was built by a local
    rajah in the 16th Century as a game 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 government wildlife
    reserve, now open to visitors.
    
    The place looks more like what I have just described than
    any actual building you might find in India. All the stones
    in the broken walls are weathered 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
    them, but as thrifty Indian janitors would--with hunks
    of bamboo and rust-spotted 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 on your knees.
    
    In one place you walk along a stone wall with a series
    of old pitted friezes carved into it. One end of the
    wall has broken off and settled into the earth, perhaps
    because of some long-forgotten earthquake, and so a broad
    jagged crack runs across a panel or two, but the story
    is still readable: first, 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
    allusion (or, in showbiz lingo, a tie-in) to the gigantic
    Tree of Life that dominates 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 historically
    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 Life with a scimitar, and the animals
    fleeing every which way. The one after that shows the
    misguided human getting walloped by a tidal wave, part of a
    latter-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 standing 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 upcoming period
    of grave ecological tribulations that will last for a few
    decades or centuries and end when we find a new harmonious
    modus vivendi with Nature.
    
    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 deserve credit for it. But
    there are no signatures on the Maharajah's game reserve at
    Disney World. There are no signatures on anything, because
    it would ruin the whole effect to have long strings of
    production credits dangling from every custom-worn brick,
    as they do from Hollywood movies.
    
    Among Hollywood writers, Disney has the reputation of
    being a real wicked stepmother. It's not hard to see
    why. Disney is in the business of putting out a product
    of seamless illusion--a magic mirror that reflects the
    world back better than it really is. But a writer is
    literally talking to his or her 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
    direct and explicit channel from user to machine than the
    GUI, so it is with words, writer, and reader.
    
    The word, in the end, is the only system of encoding
    thoughts--the only medium--that is not fungible, that
    refuses to dissolve in the devouring torrent of electronic
    media (the richer tourists at Disney World wear t-shirts
    printed with the names of famous designers, because designs
    themselves can be bootlegged easily and with impunity. The
    only way to make clothing that cannot be legally bootlegged
    is to print copyrighted and trademarked words on it; once
    you have taken that step, the clothing itself doesn't
    really matter, and so a t-shirt is as good as anything
    else. T-shirts with expensive words on them are now the
    insignia of the upper class. T-shirts with cheap words,
    or no words at all, are for the commoners).
    
    But this special quality of words and of written
    communication would have the same effect on Disney's
    product as spray-painted graffiti on a magic mirror. So
    Disney does most of its communication without resorting to
    words, and for the most part, the words aren't missed. Some
    of Disney's older properties, such as Peter Pan, Winnie the
    Pooh, and Alice in Wonderland, came out of books. But the
    authors' names are rarely if ever mentioned, and you can't
    buy the original books at the Disney store. If you could,
    they would all seem old and queer, like very bad knockoffs
    of the purer, more authentic Disney versions. Compared
    to more recent productions like Beauty and the Beast and
    Mulan, the Disney movies based on these books (particularly
    Alice in 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 their
    personal strangeness shines straight through all the layers
    of Disneyfication like x-rays through a wall. Probably
    for this very reason, Disney seems to have stopped buying
    books altogether, and now finds its themes and characters
    in folk tales, which have the lapidary, time-worn quality
    of the ancient bricks in the Maharajah's ruins.
    
    If I can risk a broad generalization, most of the people
    who go to Disney World have zero interest in absorbing
    new ideas from books. Which sounds snide, but listen:
    they have no qualms about being presented with ideas in
    other 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 the 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 graves 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 execution is superb. But
    it's easy to find the whole environment a little creepy,
    because something is missing: the translation of all its
    content into clear explicit written words, the attribution
    of the ideas to specific people. You can't argue with
    it. It seems as if a hell of a lot might be being glossed
    over, as if Disney World might be putting one over on
    us, and possibly 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 command-line interface to the GUI.
    
    Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business:
    short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication
    with expensively designed interfaces. Disney 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 graphical or sensorial ones--a trend that
    accounts for the success of both Microsoft and Disney?
    
    Part of it is simply that the world is very complicated
    now--much more complicated 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 have
    no choice but to trust some nameless artist at Disney or
    programmer at Apple 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, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows
    it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people
    agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores,
    and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball,
    and they screwed everything up and turned the century into
    an abbatoir. Those wordy 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
    intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have
    lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything
    like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading
    books any more, though we are literate. We seem much
    more comfortable with propagating those values to future
    generations nonverbally, through a process of being
    steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some
    degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that
    local arrestees 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 outraged. 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 Declaration of
    Independence.
    
    A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates
    its core values through 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 they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important
    concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the
    Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed 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, with long runways from which B-52s could
    take off and reach Cuba, or just about 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, Russia and Japan, so that
    they can come to Disney World and steep in our media 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 everyone outside of the United
    States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and
    diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many
    cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate
    cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism
    (or "honoring diversity" or whatever you want to call it)
    is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop
    asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this
    is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one
    thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that 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 hostility towards, all authority figures in
    modern culture. As David Foster Wallace has explained
    in his essay "E Unibus Pluram," this is the fundamental
    message of television; it is the message that people take
    home, anyway, after they have steeped in our media long
    enough. It's not expressed in these highfalutin terms,
    of course. It comes through as the presumption that all
    authority figures--teachers, generals, cops, ministers,
    politicians--are hypocritical 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 judgments as to right and wrong, true
    and false, etc., there's no real culture left. All that
    remains is clog dancing and macrame. The ability to make
    judgments, to believe things, is the entire it point of
    having a culture. I think this is why guys with machine
    guns sometimes pop up in places like Luxor, and begin
    pumping bullets into Westerners. They perfectly understand
    the lesson of McCoy Air Force Base. When their sons come
    home wearing Chicago Bulls 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 world by television is a culture unto itself,
    and by the standards of great and ancient cultures like
    Islam and France, it seems grossly inferior, at least at
    first. The only good thing you can say about it is that
    it makes world 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 global monoculture, is completely
    screwed. Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees
    any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere
    of moral relativism, 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 and corporate boards--understand
    all of this at some level. They pay lip service to
    multiculturalism and diversity and non-judgmentalness, but
    they don't raise their own children that way. I have highly
    educated, technically sophisticated 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
    large 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 same 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 cynical, of course,
    but many spend at least part of their time fretting
    about what direction the country is going in, and what
    responsibilities they have. And so issues that are
    important to book-reading intellectuals, such as global
    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 systems? 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 where 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
    lots of subterranean Morlocks who kept the technological
    wheels turning. But in 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. The much more numerous Eloi learn everything they
    know from being steeped from birth in electronic media
    directed and controlled by book-reading Morlocks. So many
    ignorant people could be dangerous if they got pointed
    in the wrong direction, and so we've evolved a popular
    culture that is (a) almost unbelievably infectious and (b)
    neuters every person who gets infected by it, by rendering
    them unwilling to make judgments and incapable of taking
    stands.
    
    Morlocks, who have the energy and intelligence to
    comprehend details, go out and master complex subjects and
    produce Disney-like Sensorial Interfaces so that Eloi can
    get the gist without having to strain their minds or endure
    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 point of absurdity: your basic snotty
    intellectual throwing a tantrum about those unlettered
    philistines. As if I were a self-styled Moses, coming down
    from the mountain all alone, carrying the stone tablets
    bearing the Ten Commandments carved in immutable stone--the
    original command-line interface--and blowing his stack at
    the weak, unenlightened Hebrews worshipping images. Not
    only that, but it sounds like I'm pumping some sort of
    conspiracy theory.
    
    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 everything in detail. And it's better
    to comprehend it dimly, through an interface, 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 mutual 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 into regular dudes--construction workers,
    auto mechanics, taxi drivers, galoots in general--who
    were largely aliterate until something made it necessary
    for them to become readers and start actually thinking
    about things. Perhaps 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 simply got bored. Such people can get up to speed
    on particular subjects quite rapidly. Sometimes their
    lack of a broad education makes them over-apt to 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 fads and whims of voters who
    actually believe that there are significant differences
    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 pat and saccharine, but,
    hey, if the result of that is to instill basically warm and
    sympathetic reflexes, at a preverbal level, into hundreds
    of millions of unlettered media-steepers, then how bad can
    it be? We killed a lobster in our kitchen last night and
    my daughter cried for an hour. The Japanese, who used to
    be just about the fiercest people on earth, have become
    infatuated with cuddly adorable cartoon characters. My
    own family--the people I know best--is divided about
    evenly between people who will probably read this essay
    and people who almost certainly won't, and I can't say
    for sure that one group is necessarily warmer, happier,
    or better-adjusted than the other.
    
    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 all
    hidden assumptions, and cruelly punished laziness and
    imprecision. Then the interface-makers went to work on
    their GUIs, and introduced a new semiotic layer between
    people and machines. People who use such systems have
    abdicated the responsibility, and surrendered the power,
    of sending bits directly to the chip that's doing the
    arithmetic, and handed that responsibility and power
    over to the OS. This is tempting because giving clear
    instructions, to anyone or anything, is difficult. We
    cannot do it without thinking, and depending on the
    complexity of the situation, we may have to think
    hard about abstract things, and consider any number of
    ramifications, in order to 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 that tries to translate humans' vaguely
    expressed intentions into bits. In effect we are asking our
    computers to shoulder responsibilities that have always
    been considered the province of human beings--we want
    them to understand our desires, to anticipate our needs,
    to foresee consequences, to make connections, to handle
    routine chores without being asked, to remind us of what
    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 through a set of conventions--menus, buttons,
    and so on. These work in the sense that analogies work:
    they help Eloi understand abstract or unfamiliar concepts
    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 subsumed any number of lesser (and
    frequently conflicting, or at least mixed) metaphors. Under
    a GUI, a file (frequently called "document") is
    metaphrased as a window on the screen (which is called
    a "desktop"). The window is almost always too small to
    contain the document and so you "move around," or, more
    pretentiously, "navigate" in the document by "clicking and
    dragging" the "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 (at 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 deconstruct 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,
    permanent, immutable records of it. But computer documents
    are volatile, ephemeral constellations of data. Sometimes
    (as when you've just opened or saved them) the document as
    portrayed in the window is identical to what is stored,
    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 any case, every time you
    hit "Save" you annihilate the previous version of the
    "document" and replace it with whatever happens to be in
    the window at the moment. So even the word "save" is being
    used in a sense that is grotesquely misleading---"destroy
    one version, save another" would be more accurate.
    
    Anyone who uses a word processor for very long inevitably
    has the experience 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 disappears
    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 warning, it is completely and
    irretrievably gone, as if it had never existed. The user
    is left with a feeling of disorientation (to say nothing
    of annoyance) stemming from a kind of metaphor shear--you
    realize that you've been living 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
    different from, and in many cases almost diametrically
    opposed to, the old. Somewhat improbably, this has worked
    very well, at least from a commercial standpoint, 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 in a few minutes. Everything works a
    little differently, like European plumbing--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 average 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 important--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 numerous interesting ways of affecting
    the real world: making paper spew out of printers,
    causing words to appear on screens thousands of miles
    away, shooting beams of radiation through cancer patients,
    creating realistic moving 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 change channels and show program guides. Modern
    cellular telephones have a crude GUI built into a tiny LCD
    screen. Even Legos now have a GUI: you can buy a Lego set
    called Mindstorms that enables you to build little Lego
    robots 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 typewriter. 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 without some sort of interface that
    enables them to use it. The internal combustion engine
    was a technological marvel in its day, but useless as a
    consumer good until a clutch, transmission, steering wheel
    and throttle were connected to it. That odd collection
    of gizmos, which survives to this day in every 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 bothered 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 steering 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 imaginable 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 mechanical controls. My friend's dad,
    the gentleman who was restoring the MGB, never 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 learn it. Likewise with the dial telephone
    and the AM radio. By the time of the Second World War,
    most people knew several interfaces: they could not only
    churn butter but also drive a car, dial a telephone,
    turn on a radio, summon flame from a cigarette lighter,
    and change a light bulb.
    
    But now every little thing--wristwatches, VCRs,
    stoves--is jammed with features, 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 even 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 compete without offering features.
    
    It's no longer acceptable for engineers to invent a
    wholly novel user interface for every new product, as
    they did in the case of the automobile, partly because
    it's too expensive and partly because ordinary people can
    only learn so much. If the VCR had been invented a hundred
    years ago, it would have 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 because the VCR was invented
    when it was--during a sort of awkward transitional 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 enough to
    the engineers responsible for it, but to many users it
    was simply impossible. Thus the famous blinking 12:00
    that appears on so many VCRs. Computer 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 that you can set the time and
    control other features through a sort of primitive
    GUI. GUIs have virtual pushbuttons too, of course,
    but they also have other 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 the front of the machine, and
    so the blinking 12:00 itself is slowly disappearing 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 become a sort of meta-interface that
    is pressed into service for every new piece 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 now is having some kind of interface that
    customers will actually use, so that 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 easy and simple,
    and putting a nice interface on top of it does not change
    that 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 dangerous.
    
    By using GUIs all the time we have insensibly bought into
    a premise that few people would have accepted if it were
    presented to them bluntly: namely, that hard things can
    be made easy, and complicated things simple, by putting
    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 employs facile generalizations in almost every
    sentence. Readers rarely have to think, and are spared
    all of the difficulty and tedium typically involved 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 around 1985. After some initial hassles I
    found it to be a better tool than MacWrite, which was its
    only competition at the time. I wrote a lot of stuff in
    early versions of Word, storing it all on floppies, and
    transferred the contents 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 that as
    a writer it made sense for me to spend a certain amount
    of money on tools.
    
    Sometime in the mid-1980's I attempted to open one of
    my old, circa-1985 Word documents using the version
    of Word then current: 6.0 It didn't work. Word 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 letters that made up the text of
    the document. My words were still there. But the formatting
    had been run through a log chipper--the words I'd written
    were 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 using computers. It's
    easy to buy little file converter programs that will
    take care of this problem. But if you are a writer whose
    career is words, whose professional identity is a corpus
    of written documents, this kind of thing is extremely
    disquieting. There are very few fixed assumptions in my
    line of work, but one of them is that once you have written
    a word, it is written, and cannot be unwritten. The ink
    stains the paper, the chisel cuts the stone, the stylus
    marks the clay, and something has irrevocably happened
    (my brother-in-law is a theologian who reads 3250-year-old
    cuneiform tablets--he can recognize the handwriting of
    particular scribes, and identify them by name). But
    word-processing software--particularly the sort that
    employs 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 years' literary
    output can cease to exist.
    
    Now this was technically a fault in the application (Word
    6.0 for the Macintosh) 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 and 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 flashy
    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 consequence
    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 hotel, placing
    myself in the hands of past masters of the Sensorial
    Interface, and had sat down in my room and written a story
    in ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad, and when I returned
    from dinner, discovered that the maid had 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 random
    from the dictionary. Appalling, sure, but I couldn't
    really lodge a complaint 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 Eloi.
    
    
    LINUX
    
    During the late 1980's and early 1990's I spent a lot of
    time programming Macintoshes, and eventually decided for
    fork over several hundred dollars for 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 Macintosh code. Given
    that MacOS was far more technologically advanced, at the
    time, 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 creative engineers,
    I had high expectations. It arrived on a stack of
    floppy disks about a foot high, and so there was plenty
    of time for my excitement to build during the endless
    installation process. The first time I launched MPW, I
    was probably expecting some kind of touch-feely multimedia
    showcase. Instead it was austere, almost to the point of
    being intimidating. It was a scrolling window into which
    you could type simple, unformatted text. The system would
    then interpret these lines of text as commands, and try
    to execute 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 invoked by typing their
    names, and which I learned to use only gradually. It
    was 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-creation of Unix.
    
    In other words, the first thing that Apple's hackers had
    done when they'd got the MacOS up and running--probably
    even before they'd gotten it up and running--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 around this, but: as far as Apple's
    hackers were concerned, the Mac's vaunted Graphical User
    Interface was an impediment, something to be circumvented
    before 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 runs high-tech
    companies in Boston, had developed a commercial product
    using Macintoshes as the front end. Basically the Macs were
    high-performance graphics terminals, chosen for their sweet
    user interface, giving users access to a large database
    of graphical information stored on a network of much more
    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-1980's we had shared the
    thrill of being high-tech cognoscenti, using superior 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 joined the network, mysterious
    crashes began to occur; sometimes the whole network would
    just freeze. It was one of those bugs that could not be
    reproduced easily. Finally they figured out that these
    network crashes were triggered whenever a user, scanning
    the menus for a particular item, held down the 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 was not capable of
    doing anything else until that indecisive user released
    the button.
    
    This is not such a bad thing in a single-user,
    single-process machine (although it's a fairly bad thing),
    but it's no good in a machine that is on a network, 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 and powerful than either
    MS-DOS or the original MacOS. The only way of connecting
    to the Internet that's worth taking seriously is PPP, the
    Point-to-Point Protocol, which (never mind the details)
    makes your computer--temporarily--a full-fledged member
    of the Global Internet, with its own unique address,
    and various privileges, powers, and responsibilities
    appertaining thereunto. Technically it means your machine
    is running the TCP/IP protocol, which, to make a long
    story short, revolves around sending packets of data back
    and forth, in no particular order, and at unpredictable
    times, according to a clever and elegant set of rules. But
    sending a packet of data is one thing, and so an OS that
    can only do one thing at a time cannot simultaneously be
    part of the Internet and do anything else. When TCP/IP was
    invented, running 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 Windows. 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 learned 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 document. The document
    was too big to fit onto a single floppy, and so I hadn't
    made a backup since leaving home. The PowerBook crashed
    and wiped out the 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 PowerBook with me. My friends
    at Electric Communities were Mac users who had all sorts
    of utility software for unerasing files and recovering
    from disk crashes, 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 systematically wiped
    out. We went through that hard disk block by block and
    found disjointed fragments of countless old, discarded,
    forgotten files, but none of what I wanted. The metaphor
    shear was especially brutal that day. It was sort of like
    watching the girl you've been in love with for ten years
    get 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 synchronistic things
    happened.
    
    (1) Randy Farmer, a co-founder of the company, came in for
    a quick visit along with his family--he was recovering from
    back surgery at the time. He had some hot gossip: "Windows
    95 mastered today." What this meant was that Microsoft's
    new operating system had, on this day, been placed on a
    special compact disk known as a golden master, which would
    be used to stamp out a jintillion copies in preparation for
    its thunderous release a few weeks later. This news was
    received peevishly by the staff of Electric Communities,
    including one whose office door was plastered with the
    usual assortment of cartoons and novelties, e.g.
    
    (2) a copy of a Dilbert cartoon in which Dilbert, the
    long-suffering corporate 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. Dilbert recognizes this man, based upon his appearance
    and affect, as a Unix hacker, and reacts with a certain
    mixture of nervousness, awe, and hostility. Dilbert
    jabs weakly at the disturbing interloper for a couple of
    frames; the Unix hacker listens with a kind of infuriating,
    beatific calm, then, in 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 systems. Unlike most
    Bay Area techies who revered the Macintosh, considering
    it to be a true hacker's machine, Barnes was fond of
    pointing out that the Mac, with its hermetically sealed
    architecture, was actually hostile to hackers, who
    are prone to tinkering and dogmatic about openness. By
    contrast, the IBM-compatible line of machines, which can
    easily be taken apart and plugged 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 called 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 hardware over the years. But Linux's great
    virtue was, and is, that it would run on exactly the same
    sort of hardware as the Microsoft OSes--which is to say,
    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. Once I got it home, I yanked the hood off,
    stuck my hands in, and began switching cards around. If
    something didn't work, I went to a used-computer outlet
    and pawed through a bin full of components and bought a
    new card for a few 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 larger
    market, the hardware regime changed: the cost of color
    video cards and high-resolution monitors began to drop,
    and is dropping still. This free-for-all approach to
    hardware meant that Windows was unavoidably clunky
    compared to MacOS. But the GUI brought computing to
    such a vast audience that volume went way up and prices
    collapsed. Meanwhile Apple, which so badly wanted a clean,
    integrated OS with video neatly integrated into processing
    hardware, had fallen far behind in market share, at least
    partly because their beautiful hardware cost so much.
    
    But the price that we Mac owners had to pay for superior
    aesthetics and engineering was not merely a financial
    one. There was a cultural price too, stemming 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 machine of choice of scruffy,
    creative hacker types, had actually created a machine
    that discouraged hacking, while Microsoft, viewed as a
    technological laggard 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 system wars, like the Russian Army. Most
    people know it only by reputation, and its reputation,
    as the Dilbert cartoon suggests, is mixed. But everyone
    seems to agree that if it could only get its act together
    and stop surrendering vast tracts of rich agricultural
    land and hundreds of thousands of prisoners 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 into 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
    Hole Hawg does not have the pistol-like design of a cheap
    homeowner's drill. It is a cube of solid metal with a
    handle sticking out of one face and a chuck mounted in
    another. The cube contains a disconcertingly potent
    electric motor. You can hold the handle and operate
    the trigger with your index finger, but unless you are
    exceptionally strong you cannot control the weight of
    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 (provided), which you screw
    into one side of the iron cube or the other depending 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 chunk of pipe.
    
    During the Eighties I did some construction work. One
    day, another worker leaned 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
    hole through the exterior wall. At some point, the drill
    bit caught in the wall. The Hole Hawg, following its one
    and only imperative, kept going. It spun the worker's
    body around like a rag doll, causing him to knock his own
    ladder down. Fortunately he kept his grip on the Hole Hawg,
    which remained lodged 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 as a blender chops cabbage. I also
    used it to cut a few six-inch-diameter holes through an
    old lath-and-plaster ceiling. I chucked in a new hole saw,
    went 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 homeowner'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 stupid consistency of a spinning planet. When
    the hole saw seized up, the Hole Hawg spun itself and
    me around, and crushed one of my hands between the steel
    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, though 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 atavistic terror.
    
    But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. The Hole
    Hawg is dangerous because it does exactly what you tell it
    to. It is not bound by the physical limitations that are
    inherent in a cheap drill, and neither is it limited by
    safety interlocks that might be built into a homeowner's
    product by a liability-conscious manufacturer. The danger
    lies not in the machine itself but in the user's failure
    to envision the full consequences of the instructions 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 unpredictable 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 and precisely and with unlimited
    power, often with disastrous, unforeseen consequences.
    
    Pre-Hole Hawg, I used to examine the drill selection in
    hardware stores with what I thought was a judicious eye,
    scorning the smaller low-end models and hefting the big
    expensive ones appreciatively, wishing I could afford one
    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 believe
    that they have purchased an actual tool. Their plastic
    casings, carefully 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 ever
    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 Hole Hawg. Such
    a person, presented with the best and most expensive
    hardware-store drill, would not even recognize it as
    such. He might instead misidentify it as a child's toy,
    or some kind of motorized screwdriver. If a salesperson or
    a deluded homeowner referred to it as a drill, he would
    laugh and tell them that they were mistaken--they simply
    had their terminology wrong. His interlocutor would go away
    irritated, and probably feeling rather defensive about his
    basement full of cheap, dangerous, flashy, colorful tools.
    
    Unix is the Hole Hawg of operating systems, and Unix
    hackers, like Doug Barnes and the guy in the Dilbert
    cartoon and many of the other people who populate Silicon
    Valley, are like contractor's sons who grew up using only
    Hole Hawgs. They might use Apple/Microsoft OSes to write
    letters, play video games, or balan