Stephenson, Neal - CRYPTONOMICON

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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>Welcome to the Avon Books Homepage</TITLE>

</HEAD>

<AREA SHAPE="rect" COORDS="18,119,112,131"

HREF="/avon_user/category.html?category_id=271">

<AREA SHAPE="rect" COORDS="19,140,112,152"

HREF="http://www.goners.com/">

<AREA SHAPE="rect" COORDS="18,161,111,173"

HREF="http://www.spikebooks.com/">

<AREA SHAPE="rect" COORDS="2,181,112,195"

HREF="/avon_user/category.html?category_id=277">

<AREA SHAPE="rect" COORDS="9,203,112,216"

HREF="/chathamisland/">

<AREA SHAPE="rect" COORDS="7,223,112,236"

HREF="/avon_user/search.html">

</MAP>

<BODY TEXT="#478CFF" LINK="#FFFFFF" VLINK="#000000"

ALINK="#478CFF" BGCOLOR="#003399">

<TABLE BORDER="0" WIDTH="600" CELLPADDING="0"

CELLSPACING="0">

<A HREF="/cgi-bin/imagemap/maps/left.gif.map"><IMG

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WIDTH="165" HEIGHT="121" BORDER="0"></A><BR><A

HREF="/avon/feature/feb99/crook.html"><IMG

SRC="/avon/images/home/feb99/crook_text.gif" ALT="The Crook Factory"

WIDTH="165" HEIGHT="96" BORDER="0"></A><BR><A

HREF="http://apps.hearstnewmedia.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+APPSSURVEYS

Questionnaire?domain_id=182&survey_id=541"><IMG

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WIDTH="165" HEIGHT="63" BORDER="0"></A></TD>

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</BODY>

</HTML>

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

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IntheBeginningwastheCommandLinebyNealStephensonAbouttwentyyearsagoJobsandWozniak,thefoundersofApple,cameupwiththeverystrangeideaofsellinginformationprocessingmachinesforuseinthehome.Thebusinesstookoff,anditsfoundersmadealotofmoneyandreceivedthecredittheydeservedforbeingdaringvisionaries.Butaroundthe...

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Stephenson, Neal - CRYPTONOMICON

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