In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

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

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

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

Sadly, the most reliable signal american tech companies send is that they are building a surveillance state, whether it's for the US government or just their own fiefdoms (franchulates?) seems not to concern them, but neither is particularly appealing to me as a prospective customer

>like a Ford Pinto with an exploding gas tank"

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

Windows Vista had suicide doors

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

Just give it a couple of years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or his dad at Planned Parenthood

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

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

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

Imagine how different the world might be if we did.

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

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CosmOS

s/runs on/written in/

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

What's it's endianness

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

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

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

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

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

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

> What is or was The Homer?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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