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:
Shift Online
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 balance their checkbooks,
but they cannot really bring themselves to take these
operating systems seriously.
THE ORAL TRADITION
Unix is hard to learn. The process of learning it is one
of multiple small epiphanies. Typically you are just on
the verge of inventing some necessary tool or utility
when you realize that someone else has already invented
it, and built it in, and this explains some odd file or
directory or command that you have noticed but never really
understood before.
For example there is a command (a small program, part
of the OS) called whoami, which enables you to ask the
computer who it thinks you are. On a Unix machine, you
are always logged in under some name--possibly even your
own! What files you may work with, and what software you
may use, depends on your identity. When I started out using
Linux, I was on a non-networked machine in my basement,
with only one user account, and so when I became aware of
the whoami command it struck me as ludicrous. But once
you are logged in as one person, you can temporarily
switch over to a pseudonym in order to access different
files. If your machine is on the Internet, you can log
onto other computers, provided you have a user name and
a password. At that point the distant machine becomes
no different in practice from the one right in front of
you. These changes in identity and location can easily
become nested inside each other, many layers deep, even
if you aren't doing anything nefarious. Once you have
forgotten who and where you are, the whoami command is
indispensible. I use it all the time.
The file systems of Unix machines all have the same general
structure. On your flimsy operating systems, you can create
directories (folders) and give them names like Frodo or
My Stuff and put them pretty much anywhere you like. But
under Unix the highest level--the root--of the filesystem
is always designated with the single character "/" and it
always contains the same set of top-level directories:
/usr /etc /var /bin /proc /boot /home /root /sbin /dev /lib /tmp
and each of these directories typically has its own
distinct structure of subdirectories. Note the obsessive
use of abbreviations and avoidance of capital letters;
this is a system invented by people to whom repetitive
stress disorder is what black lung is to miners. Long
names get worn down to three-letter nubbins, like stones
smoothed by a river.
This is not the place to try to explain why each of the
above directories exists, and what is contained in it. At
first it all seems obscure; worse, it seems deliberately
obscure. When I started using Linux I was accustomed to
being able to create directories wherever I wanted and
to give them whatever names struck my fancy. Under Unix
you are free to do that, of course (you are free to do
anything) but as you gain experience with the system you
come to understand that the directories listed above were
created for the best of reasons and that your life will be
much easier if you follow along (within /home, by the way,
you have pretty much unlimited freedom).
After this kind of thing has happened several hundred
or thousand times, the hacker understands why Unix is
the way it is, and agrees that it wouldn't be the same
any other way. It is this sort of acculturation that
gives Unix hackers their confidence in the system, and
the attitude of calm, unshakable, annoying superiority
captured in the Dilbert cartoon. Windows 95 and MacOS are
products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific
companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as
it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker
subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.
What made old epics like Gilgamesh so powerful and
so long-lived was that they were living bodies of
narrative that many people knew by heart, and told over
and over again--making their own personal embellishments
whenever it struck their fancy. The bad embellishments
were shouted down, the good ones picked up by others,
polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the
story. Likewise, Unix is known, loved, and understood by
so many hackers that it can be re-created from scratch
whenever someone needs it. This is very difficult to
understand for people who are accustomed to thinking of
OSes as things that absolutely have to be bought.
Many hackers have launched more or less successful
re-implementations of the Unix ideal. Each one brings in
new embellishments. Some of them die out quickly, some
are merged with similar, parallel innovations created
by different hackers attacking the same problem, others
still are embraced, and adopted into the epic. Thus Unix
has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired
a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is
organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of
a coronary artery. Understanding it is more like anatomy
than physics.
For at least a year, prior to my adoption of Linux, I
had been hearing about it. Credible, well-informed people
kept telling me that a bunch of hackers had got together
an implentation of Unix that could be downloaded, free of
charge, from the Internet. For a long time I could not
bring myself to take the notion seriously. It was like
hearing rumors that a group of model rocket enthusiasts
had created a completely functional Saturn V by exchanging
blueprints on the Net and mailing valves and flanges to
each other.
But it's true. Credit for Linux generally goes to its human
namesake, one Linus Torvalds, a Finn who got the whole
thing rolling in 1991 when he used some of the GNU tools
to write the beginnings of a Unix kernel that could run on
PC-compatible hardware. And indeed Torvalds deserves all
the credit he has ever gotten, and a whole lot more. But
he could not have made it happen by himself, any more
than Richard Stallman could have. To write code at all,
Torvalds had to have cheap but powerful development tools,
and these he got from Stallman's GNU project.
And he had to have cheap hardware on which to write that
code. Cheap hardware is a much harder thing to arrange
than cheap software; a single person (Stallman) can write
software and put it up on the Net for free, but in order
to make hardware it's necessary to have a whole industrial
infrastructure, which is not cheap by any stretch of the
imagination. Really the only way to make hardware cheap
is to punch out an incredible number of copies of it, so
that the unit cost eventually drops. For reasons already
explained, Apple had no desire to see the cost of hardware
drop. The only reason Torvalds had cheap hardware was
Microsoft.
Microsoft refused to go into the hardware business,
insisted on making its software run on hardware that anyone
could build, and thereby created the market conditions
that allowed hardware prices to plummet. In trying to
understand the Linux phenomenon, then, we have to look not
to a single innovator but to a sort of bizarre Trinity:
Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Bill Gates. Take
away any of these three and Linux would not exist.
OS SHOCK
Young Americans who leave their great big homogeneous
country and visit some other part of the world typically
go through several stages of culture shock: first,
dumb wide-eyed astonishment. Then a tentative engagement
with the new country's manners, cuisine, public transit
systems and toilets, leading to a brief period of fatuous
confidence that they are instant experts on the new
country. As the visit wears on, homesickness begins to set
in, and the traveler begins to appreciate, for the first
time, how much he or she took for granted at home. At the
same time it begins to seem obvious that many of one's
own cultures and traditions are essentially arbitrary,
and could have been different; driving on the right side of
the road, for example. When the traveler returns home and
takes stock of the experience, he or she may have learned
a good deal more about America than about the country they
went to visit.
For the same reasons, Linux is worth trying. It is a
strange country indeed, but you don't have to live there;
a brief sojourn suffices to give some flavor of the place
and--more importantly--to lay bare everything that is taken
for granted, and all that could have been done differently,
under Windows or MacOS.
You can't try it unless you install it. With any other OS,
installing it would be a straightforward transaction: in
exchange for money, some company would give you a CD-ROM,
and you would be on your way. But a lot is subsumed in
that kind of transaction, and has to be gone through and
picked apart.
We like plain dealings and straightforward transactions
in America. If you go to Egypt and, say, take a taxi
somewhere, you become a part of the taxi driver's life;
he refuses to take your money because it would demean
your friendship, he follows you around town, and weeps
hot tears when you get in some other guy's taxi. You end
up meeting his kids at some point, and have to devote all
sort of ingenuity to finding some way to compensate him
without insulting his honor. It is exhausting. Sometimes
you just want a simple Manhattan-style taxi ride.
But in order to have an American-style setup, where
you can just go out and hail a taxi and be on your way,
there must exist a whole hidden apparatus of medallions,
inspectors, commissions, and so forth--which is fine as
long as taxis are cheap and you can always get one. When
the system fails to work in some way, it is mysterious
and infuriating and turns otherwise reasonable people into
conspiracy theorists. But when the Egyptian system breaks
down, it breaks down transparently. You can't get a taxi,
but your driver's nephew will show up, on foot, to explain
the problem and apologize.
Microsoft and Apple do things the Manhattan way, with vast
complexity hidden behind a wall of interface. Linux does
things the Egypt way, with vast complexity strewn about
all over the landscape. If you've just flown in from
Manhattan, your first impulse will be to throw up your
hands and say "For crying out loud! Will you people get
a grip on yourselves!?" But this does not make friends in
Linux-land any better than it would in Egypt.
You can suck Linux right out of the air, as it were, by
downloading the right files and putting them in the right
places, but there probably are not more than a few hundred
people in the world who could create a functioning Linux
system in that way. What you really need is a distribution
of Linux, which means a prepackaged set of files. But
distributions are a separate thing from Linux per se.
Linux per se is not a specific set of ones and zeroes,
but a self-organizing Net subculture. The end result of
its collective lucubrations is a vast body of source code,
almost all written in C (the dominant computer programming
language). "Source code" just means a computer program
as typed in and edited by some hacker. If it's in C,
the file name will probably have .c or .cpp on the end of
it, depending on which dialect was used; if it's in some
other language it will have some other suffix. Frequently
these sorts of files can be found in a directory with the
name /src which is the hacker's Hebraic abbreviation of
"source."
Source files are useless to your computer, and of little
interest to most users, but they are of gigantic cultural
and political significance, because Microsoft and Apple
keep them secret while Linux makes them public. They are
the family jewels. They are the sort of thing that in
Hollywood thrillers is used as a McGuffin: the plutonium
bomb core, the top-secret blueprints, the suitcase
of bearer bonds, the reel of microfilm. If the source
files for Windows or MacOS were made public on the Net,
then those OSes would become free, like Linux--only not as
good, because no one would be around to fix bugs and answer
questions. Linux is "open source" software meaning, simply,
that anyone can get copies of its source code files.
Your computer doesn't want source code any more than you
do; it wants object code. Object code files typically
have the suffix .o and are unreadable all but a few,
highly strange humans, because they consist of ones and
zeroes. Accordingly, this sort of file commonly shows up
in a directory with the name /bin, for "binary."
Source files are simply ASCII text files. ASCII denotes a
particular way of encoding letters into bit patterns. In
an ASCII file, each character has eight bits all to
itself. This creates a potential "alphabet" of 256
distinct characters, in that eight binary digits can
form that many unique patterns. In practice, of course,
we tend to limit ourselves to the familiar letters and
digits. The bit-patterns used to represent those letters
and digits are the same ones that were physically punched
into the paper tape by my high school teletype, which in
turn were the same one used by the telegraph industry for
decades previously. ASCII text files, in other words,
are telegrams, and as such they have no typographical
frills. But for the same reason they are eternal, because
the code never changes, and universal, because every text
editing and word processing software ever written knows
about this code.
Therefore just about any software can be used to create,
edit, and read source code files. Object code files, then,
are created from these source files by a piece of software
called a compiler, and forged into a working application
by another piece of software called a linker.
The triad of editor, compiler, and linker, taken together,
form the core of a software development system. Now,
it is possible to spend a lot of money on shrink-wrapped
development systems with lovely graphical user interfaces
and various ergonomic enhancements. In some cases it might
even be a good and reasonable way to spend money. But on
this side of the road, as it were, the very best software
is usually the free stuff. Editor, compiler and linker are
to hackers what ponies, stirrups, and archery sets were
to the Mongols. Hackers live in the saddle, and hack on
their own tools even while they are using them to create
new applications. It is quite inconceivable that superior
hacking tools could have been created from a blank sheet of
paper by product engineers. Even if they are the brightest
engineers in the world they are simply outnumbered.
In the GNU/Linux world there are two major text editing
programs: the minimalist vi (known in some implementations
as elvis) and the maximalist emacs. I use emacs, which
might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It
was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written
in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is
beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight
ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface,
no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that,
in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features
like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length
motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the
case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the
deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If
you are a professional writer--i.e., if someone else is
getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted
and printed--emacs outshines all other editing software
in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does
the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply
makes everything else vanish. For page layout and printing
you can use TeX: a vast corpus of typesetting lore written
in C and also available on the Net for free.
I could say a lot about emacs and TeX, but right now I
am trying to tell a story about how to actually install
Linux on your machine. The hard-core survivalist approach
would be to download an editor like emacs, and the GNU
Tools--the compiler and linker--which are polished and
excellent to the same degree as emacs. Equipped with these,
one would be able to start downloading ASCII source code
files (/src) and compiling them into binary object code
files (/bin) that would run on the machine. But in order
to even arrive at this point--to get emacs running, for
example--you have to have Linux actually up and running
on your machine. And even a minimal Linux operating system
requires thousands of binary files all acting in concert,
and arranged and linked together just so.
Several entities have therefore taken it upon themselves to
create "distributions" of Linux. If I may extend the Egypt
analogy slightly, these entities are a bit like tour guides
who meet you at the airport, who speak your language, and
who help guide you through the initial culture shock. If
you are an Egyptian, of course, you see it the other way;
tour guides exist to keep brutish outlanders from traipsing
through your mosques and asking you the same questions
over and over and over again.
Some of these tour guides are commercial organizations,
such as Red Hat Software, which makes a Linux distribution
called Red Hat that has a relatively commercial sheen to
it. In most cases you put a Red Hat CD-ROM into your PC
and reboot and it handles the rest. Just as a tour guide
in Egypt will expect some sort of compensation for his
services, commercial distributions need to be paid for. In
most cases they cost almost nothing and are well worth it.
I use a distribution called Debian (the word
is a contraction of "Deborah" and "Ian") which is
non-commercial. It is organized (or perhaps I should say
"it has organized itself") along the same lines as Linux
in general, which is to say that it consists of volunteers
who collaborate over the Net, each responsible for looking
after a different chunk of the system. These people have
broken Linux down into a number of packages, which are
compressed files that can be downloaded to an already
functioning Debian Linux system, then opened up and
unpacked using a free installer application. Of course,
as such, Debian has no commercial arm--no distribution
mechanism. You can download all Debian packages over
the Net, but most people will want to have them on a
CD-ROM. Several different companies have taken it upon
themselves to decoct all of the current Debian packages
onto CD-ROMs and then sell them. I buy mine from Linux
Systems Labs. The cost for a three-disc set, containing
Debian in its entirety, is less than three dollars. But
(and this is an important distinction) not a single penny
of that three dollars is going to any of the coders who
created Linux, nor to the Debian packagers. It goes to
Linux Systems Labs and it pays, not for the software,
or the packages, but for the cost of stamping out the
CD-ROMs.
Every Linux distribution embodies some more or less clever
hack for circumventing the normal boot process and causing
your computer, when it is turned on, to organize itself,
not as a PC running Windows, but as a "host" running
Unix. This is slightly alarming the first time you see
it, but completely harmless. When a PC boots up, it goes
through a little self-test routine, taking an inventory of
available disks and memory, and then begins looking around
for a disk to boot up from. In any normal Windows computer
that disk will be a hard drive. But if you have your system
configured right, it will look first for a floppy or CD-ROM
disk, and boot from that if one is available.
Linux exploits this chink in the defenses. Your computer
notices a bootable disk in the floppy or CD-ROM drive,
loads in some object code from that disk, and blindly
begins to execute it. But this is not Microsoft or
Apple code, this is Linux code, and so at this point
your computer begins to behave very differently from
what you are accustomed to. Cryptic messages began to
scroll up the screen. If you had booted a commercial OS,
you would, at this point, be seeing a "Welcome to MacOS"
cartoon, or a screen filled with clouds in a blue sky, and
a Windows logo. But under Linux you get a long telegram
printed in stark white letters on a black screen. There
is no "welcome!" message. Most of the telegram has the
semi-inscrutable menace of graffiti tags.
Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev syslogd 1.3-3#17: restart. Dec
14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: klogd 1.3-3, log source =
/proc/kmsg started. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel:
Loaded 3535 symbols from /System.map. Dec 14 15:04:15
theRev kernel: Symbols match kernel version 2.0.30. Dec 14
15:04:15 theRev kernel: No module symbols loaded. Dec 14
15:04:15 theRev kernel: Intel MultiProcessor Specification
v1.4 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Virtual Wire
compatibility mode. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: OEM ID:
INTEL Product ID: 440FX APIC at: 0xFEE00000 Dec 14 15:04:15
theRev kernel: Processor #0 Pentium(tm) Pro APIC version
17 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Processor #1 Pentium(tm)
Pro APIC version 17 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: I/O APIC
#2 Version 17 at 0xFEC00000. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel:
Processors: 2 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Console:
16 point font, 400 scans Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel:
Console: colour VGA+ 80x25, 1 virtual console (max 63) Dec
14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: pcibios_init : BIOS32 Service
Directory structure at 0x000fdb70 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev
kernel: pcibios_init : BIOS32 Service Directory entry
at 0xfdb80 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: pcibios_init :
PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xfdba1 Dec 14 15:04:15
theRev kernel: Probing PCI hardware. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev
kernel: Warning : Unknown PCI device (10b7:9001). Please
read include/linux/pci.h Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel:
Calibrating delay loop.. ok - 179.40 BogoMIPS Dec 14
15:04:15 theRev kernel: Memory: 64268k/66556k available
(700k kernel code, 384k reserved, 1204k data) Dec 14
15:04:15 theRev kernel: Swansea University Computer Society
NET3.035 for Linux 2.0 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel:
NET3: Unix domain sockets 0.13 for Linux NET3.035. Dec
14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Swansea University Computer
Society TCP/IP for NET3.034 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel:
IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel:
Checking 386/387 coupling... Ok, fpu using exception 16
error reporting. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Checking
'hlt' instruction... Ok. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel:
Linux version 2.0.30 (root@theRev) (gcc version 2.7.2.1)
#15 Fri Mar 27 16:37:24 PST 1998 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev
kernel: Booting processor 1 stack 00002000: Calibrating
delay loop.. ok - 179.40 BogoMIPS Dec 14 15:04:15
theRev kernel: Total of 2 processors activated (358.81
BogoMIPS). Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Serial driver
version 4.13 with no serial options enabled Dec 14 15:04:15
theRev kernel: tty00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A Dec
14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: tty01 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is
a 16550A Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: lp1 at 0x0378,
(polling) Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: PS/2 auxiliary
pointing device detected -- driver installed. Dec 14
15:04:15 theRev kernel: Real Time Clock Driver v1.07 Dec 14
15:04:15 theRev kernel: loop: registered device at major 7
Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: ide: i82371 PIIX (Triton) on
PCI bus 0 function 57 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: ide0:
BM-DMA at 0xffa0-0xffa7 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel:
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xffa8-0xffaf Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev
kernel: hda: Conner Peripherals 1275MB - CFS1275A, 1219MB
w/64kB Cache, LBA, CHS=619/64/63 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev
kernel: hdb: Maxtor 84320A5, 4119MB w/256kB Cache, LBA,
CHS=8928/15/63, DMA Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: hdc: ,
ATAPI CDROM drive Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: ide0 at
0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel:
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev
kernel: Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M Dec 15 11:58:06
theRev kernel: Started kswapd v 1.4.2.2 Dec 15 11:58:06
theRev kernel: FDC 0 is a National Semiconductor PC87306
Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: md driver 0.35 MAX_MD_DEV=4,
MAX_REAL=8 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: PPP: version
2.2.0 (dynamic channel allocation) Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev
kernel: TCP compression code copyright 1989 Regents of the
University of California Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel:
PPP Dynamic channel allocation code copyright 1995 Caldera,
Inc. Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: PPP line discipline
registered. Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: SLIP: version
0.8.4-NET3.019-NEWTTY (dynamic channels, max=256). Dec
15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: eth0: 3Com 3c900 Boomerang
10Mbps/Combo at 0xef00, 00:60:08:a4:3c:db, IRQ 10 Dec 15
11:58:06 theRev kernel: 8K word-wide RAM 3:5 Rx:Tx split,
10base2 interface. Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: Enabling
bus-master transmits and whole-frame receives. Dec 15
11:58:06 theRev kernel: 3c59x.c:v0.49 1/2/98 Donald Becker
http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/vortex.html Dec
15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: Partition check: Dec 15 11:58:06
theRev kernel: hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev
kernel: hdb: hdb1 hdb2 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: VFS:
Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly. Dec 15 11:58:06
theRev kernel: Adding Swap: 16124k swap-space (priority -1)
Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: EXT2-fs warning: maximal
mount count reached, running e2fsck is recommended Dec
15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: hdc: media changed Dec 15
11:58:06 theRev kernel: ISO9660 Extensions: RRIP_1991A
Dec 15 11:58:07 theRev syslogd 1.3-3#17: restart. Dec 15
11:58:09 theRev diald[87]: Unable to open options file
/etc/diald/diald.options: No such file or directory Dec 15
11:58:09 theRev diald[87]: No device specified. You must
have at least one device! Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev diald[87]:
You must define a connector script (option 'connect'). Dec
15 11:58:09 theRev diald[87]: You must define the remote ip
address. Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev diald[87]: You must define
the local ip address. Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev diald[87]:
Terminating due to damaged reconfigure.
The only parts of this that are readable, for normal
people, are the error messages and warnings. And yet
it's noteworthy that Linux doesn't stop, or crash, when
it encounters an error; it spits out a pithy complaint,
gives up on whatever processes were damaged, and keeps on
rolling. This was decidedly not true of the early versions
of Apple and Microsoft OSes, for the simple reason that
an OS that is not capable of walking and chewing gum at
the same time cannot possibly recover from errors. Looking
for, and dealing with, errors requires a separate process
running in parallel with the one that has erred. A kind
of superego, if you will, that keeps an eye on all of the
others, and jumps in when one goes astray. Now that MacOS
and Windows can do more than one thing at a time they are
much better at dealing with errors than they used to be,
but they are not even close to Linux or other Unices in
this respect; and their greater complexity has made them
vulnerable to new types of errors.
FALLIBILITY, ATONEMENT, REDEMPTION, TRUST, AND OTHER ARCANE
TECHNICAL CONCEPTS
Linux is not capable of having any centrally organized
policies dictating how to write error messages and
documentation, and so each programmer writes his
own. Usually they are in English even though tons of
Linux programmers are Europeans. Frequently they are
funny. Always they are honest. If something bad has
happened because the software simply isn't finished yet,
or because the user screwed something up, this will be
stated forthrightly. The command line interface makes it
easy for programs to dribble out little comments, warnings,
and messages here and there. Even if the application is
imploding like a damaged submarine, it can still usually
eke out a little S.O.S. message. Sometimes when you finish
working with a program and shut it down, you find that it
has left behind a series of mild warnings and low-grade
error messages in the command-line interface window from
which you launched it. As if the software were chatting to
you about how it was doing the whole time you were working
with it.
Documentation, under Linux, comes in the form of man
(short for manual) pages. You can access these either
through a GUI (xman) or from the command line (man). Here
is a sample from the man page for a program called rsh:
"Stop signals stop the local rsh process only; this is
arguably wrong, but currently hard to fix for reasons too
complicated to explain here."
The man pages contain a lot of such material, which reads
like the terse mutterings of pilots wrestling with the
controls of damaged airplanes. The general feel is of
a thousand monumental but obscure struggles seen in the
stop-action light of a strobe. Each programmer is dealing
with his own obstacles and bugs; he is too busy fixing
them, and improving the software, to explain things at
great length or to maintain elaborate pretensions.
In practice you hardly ever encounter a serious bug
while running Linux. When you do, it is almost always
with commercial software (several vendors sell software
that runs under Linux). The operating system and its
fundamental utility programs are too important to contain
serious bugs. I have been running Linux every day since
late 1995 and have seen many application programs go down
in flames, but I have never seen the operating system
crash. Never. Not once. There are quite a few Linux systems
that have been running continuously and working hard for
months or years without needing to be rebooted.
Commercial OSes have to adopt the same official stance
towards errors as Communist countries had towards
poverty. For doctrinal reasons it was not possible to admit
that poverty was a serious problem in Communist countries,
because the whole point of Communism was to eradicate
poverty. Likewise, commercial OS companies like Apple and
Microsoft can't go around admitting that their software
has bugs and that it crashes all the time, any more than
Disney can issue press releases stating that Mickey Mouse
is an actor in a suit.
This is a problem, because errors do exist and bugs do
happen. Every few months Bill Gates tries to demo a new
Microsoft product in front of a large audience only to
have it blow up in his face. Commercial OS vendors, as
a direct consequence of being commercial, are forced to
adopt the grossly disingenuous position that bugs are rare
aberrations, usually someone else's fault, and therefore
not really worth talking about in any detail. This posture,
which everyone knows to be absurd, is not limited to press
releases and ad campaigns. It informs the whole way these
companies do business and relate to their customers. If
the documentation were properly written, it would mention
bugs, errors, and crashes on every single page. If the
on-line help systems that come with these OSes reflected
the experiences and concerns of their users, they would
largely be devoted to instructions on how to cope with
crashes and errors.
But this does not happen. Joint stock corporations are
wonderful inventions that have given us many excellent
goods and services. They are good at many things. Admitting
failure is not one of them. Hell, they can't even admit
minor shortcomings.
Of course, this behavior is not as pathological in a
corporation as it would be in a human being. Most people,
nowadays, understand that corporate press releases are
issued for the benefit of the corporation's shareholders
and not for the enlightenment of the public. Sometimes the
results of this institutional dishonesty can be dreadful,
as with tobacco and asbestos. In the case of commercial
OS vendors it is nothing of the kind, of course; it is
merely annoying.
Some might argue that consumer annoyance, over time,
builds up into a kind of hardened plaque that can conceal
serious decay, and that honesty might therefore be the
best policy in the long run; the jury is still out on this
in the operating system market. The business is expanding
fast enough that it's still much better to have billions of
chronically annoyed customers than millions of happy ones.
Most system administrators I know who work with Windows NT
all the time agree that when it hits a snag, it has to be
re-booted, and when it gets seriously messed up, the only
way to fix it is to re-install the operating system from
scratch. Or at least this is the only way that they know
of to fix it, which amounts to the same thing. It is quite
possible that the engineers at Microsoft have all sorts of
insider knowledge on how to fix the system when it goes
awry, but if they do, they do not seem to be getting the
message out to any of the actual system administrators I
know.
Because Linux is not commercial--because it is, in fact,
free, as well as rather difficult to obtain, install,
and operate--it does not have to maintain any pretensions
as to its reliability. Consequently, it is much more
reliable. When something goes wrong with Linux, the error
is noticed and loudly discussed right away. Anyone with
the requisite technical knowledge can go straight to the
source code and point out the source of the error, which
is then rapidly fixed by whichever hacker has carved out
responsibility for that particular program.
As far as I know, Debian is the only Linux
distribution that has its own constitution
(http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution), but what
really sold me on it was its phenomenal bug database
(http://www.debian.org/Bugs), which is a sort of
interactive Doomsday Book of error, fallibility, and
redemption. It is simplicity itself. When had a problem
with Debian in early January of 1997, I sent in a message
describing the problem to submit@bugs.debian.org. My
problem was promptly assigned a bug report number
(#6518) and a severity level (the available choices being
critical, grave, important, normal, fixed, and wishlist)
and forwarded to mailing lists where Debian people hang
out. Within twenty-four hours I had received five e-mails
telling me how to fix the problem: two from North America,
two from Europe, and one from Australia. All of these
e-mails gave me the same suggestion, which worked, and made
my problem go away. But at the same time, a transcript
of this exchange was posted to Debian's bug database,
so that if other users had the same problem later, they
would be able to search through and find the solution
without having to enter a new, redundant bug report.
Contrast this with the experience that I had when I tried
to install Windows NT 4.0 on the very same machine about
ten months later, in late 1997. The installation program
simply stopped in the middle with no error messages. I went
to the Microsoft Support website and tried to perform a
search for existing help documents that would address my
problem. The search engine was completely nonfunctional;
it did nothing at all. It did not even give me a message
telling me that it was not working.
Eventually I decided that my motherboard must be at fault;
it was of a slightly unusual make and model, and NT did
not support as many different motherboards as Linux. I
am always looking for excuses, no matter how feeble, to
buy new hardware, so I bought a new motherboard that was
Windows NT logo-compatible, meaning that the Windows NT
logo was printed right on the box. I installed this into my
computer and got Linux running right away, then attempted
to install Windows NT again. Again, the installation died
without any error message or explanation. By this time a
couple of weeks had gone by and I thought that perhaps the
search engine on the Microsoft Support website might be up
and running. I gave that a try but it still didn't work.
So I created a new Microsoft support account, then logged
on to submit the incident. I supplied my product ID number
when asked, and then began to follow the instructions on a
series of help screens. In other words, I was submitting
a bug report just as with the Debian bug tracking
system. It's just that the interface was slicker--I
was typing my complaint into little text-editing boxes
on Web forms, doing it all through the GUI, whereas
with Debian you send in an e-mail telegram. I knew that
when I was finished submitting the bug report, it would
become proprietary Microsoft information, and other users
wouldn't be able to see it. Many Linux users would refuse
to participate in such a scheme on ethical grounds, but I
was willing to give it a shot as an experiment. In the end,
though I was never able to submit my bug report, because
the series of linked web pages that I was filling out
eventually led me to a completely blank page: a dead end.
So I went back and clicked on the buttons for "phone
support" and eventually was given a Microsoft telephone
number. When I dialed this number I got a series of
piercing beeps and a recorded message from the phone
company saying "We're sorry, your call cannot be completed
as dialed."
I tried the search page again--it was still completely
nonfunctional. Then I tried PPI (Pay Per Incident)
again. This led me through another series of Web pages
until I dead-ended at one reading: "Notice-there is no
Web page matching your request."
I tried it again, and eventually got to a Pay Per Incident
screen reading: "OUT OF INCIDENTS. There are no unused
incidents left in your account. If you would like to
purchase a support incident, click OK-you will then be
able to prepay for an incident...." The cost per incident
was $95.
The experiment was beginning to seem rather expensive, so I
gave up on the PPI approach and decided to have a go at the
FAQs posted on Microsoft's website. None of the available
FAQs had anything to do with my problem except for one
entitled "I am having some problems installing NT" which
appeared to have been written by flacks, not engineers.
So I gave up and still, to this day, have never gotten
Windows NT installed on that particular machine. For me,
the path of least resistance was simply to use Debian
Linux.
In the world of open source software, bug reports are
useful information. Making them public is a service to
other users, and improves the OS. Making them public
systematically is so important that highly intelligent
people voluntarily put time and money into running bug
databases. In the commercial OS world, however, reporting
a bug is a privilege that you have to pay lots of money
for. But if you pay for it, it follows that the bug report
must be kept confidential--otherwise anyone could get the
benefit of your ninety-five bucks! And yet nothing prevents
NT users from setting up their own public bug database.
This is, in other words, another feature of the OS market
that simply makes no sense unless you view it in the
context of culture. What Microsoft is selling through
Pay Per Incident isn't technical support so much as the
continued illusion that its customers are engaging in some
kind of rational business transaction. It is a sort of
routine maintenance fee for the upkeep of the fantasy. If
people really wanted a solid OS they would use Linux,
and if they really wanted tech support they would find a
way to get it; Microsoft's customers want something else.
As of this writing (Jan. 1999), something like 32,000 bugs
have been reported to the Debian Linux bug database. Almost
all of them have been fixed a long time ago. There are
twelve "critical" bugs still outstanding, of which the
oldest was posted 79 days ago. There are 20 outstanding
"grave" bugs of which the oldest is 1166 days old. There
are 48 "important" bugs and hundreds of "normal" and less
important ones.
Likewise, BeOS (which I'll get to in a minute) has its own
bug database (http://www.be.com/developers/bugs/index.html)
with its own classification system, including such
categories as "Not a Bug," "Acknowledged Feature," and
"Will Not Fix." Some of the "bugs" here are nothing more
than Be hackers blowing off steam, and are classified as
"Input Acknowledged." For example, I found one that was
posted on December 30th, 1998. It's in the middle of a long
list of bugs, wedged between one entitled "Mouse working
in very strange fashion" and another called "Change of
BView frame does not affect, if BView not attached to a
BWindow."
This one is entitled
R4: BeOS missing megalomaniacal figurehead to harness and
focus developer rage
and it goes like this:
----------------------------
Be Status: Input Acknowledged BeOS Version: R3.2 Component:
unknown
Full Description:
The BeOS needs a megalomaniacal egomaniac sitting on its
throne to give it a human character which everyone loves
to hate. Without this, the BeOS will languish in the
impersonifiable realm of OSs that people can never quite
get a handle on. You can judge the success of an OS not
by the quality of its features, but by how infamous and
disliked the leaders behind them are.
I believe this is a side-effect of developer comraderie
under miserable conditions. After all, misery loves
company. I believe that making the BeOS less conceptually
accessible and far less reliable will require developers
to band together, thus developing the kind of community
where strangers talk to one- another, kind of like at a
grocery store before a huge snowstorm.
Following this same program, it will likely be necessary
to move the BeOS headquarters to a far-less-comfortable
climate. General environmental discomfort will breed this
attitude within and there truly is no greater recipe for
success. I would suggest Seattle, but I think it's already
taken. You might try Washington, DC, but definitely not
somewhere like San Diego or Tucson.
----------------------------
Unfortunately, the Be bug reporting system strips off the
names of the people who report the bugs (to protect them
from retribution!?) and so I don't know who wrote this.
So it would appear that I'm in the middle of crowing
about the technical and moral superiority of Debian
Linux. But as almost always happens in the OS world, it's
more complicated than that. I have Windows NT running on
another machine, and the other day (Jan. 1999), when I
had a problem with it, I decided to have another go at
Microsoft Support. This time the search engine actually
worked (though in order to reach it I had to identify
myself as "advanced"). And instead of coughing up some
useless FAQ, it located about two hundred documents (I was
using very vague search criteria) that were obviously bug
reports--though they were called something else. Microsoft,
in other words, has got a system up and running that is
functionally equivalent to Debian's bug database. It looks
and feels different, of course, but it contains technical
nitty-gritty and makes no bones about the existence of
errors.
As I've explained, selling OSes for money is a basically
untenable position, and the only way Apple and Microsoft
can get away with it is by pursuing technological
advancements as aggressively as they can, and by getting
people to believe in, and to pay for, a particular image:
in the case of Apple, that of the creative free thinker,
and in the case of Microsoft, that of the respectable
techno-bourgeois. Just like Disney, they're making money
from selling an interface, a magic mirror. It has to be
polished and seamless or else the whole illusion is ruined
and the business plan vanishes like a mirage.
Accordingly, it was the case until recently that the
people who wrote manuals and created customer support
websites for commercial OSes seemed to have been barred, by
their employers' legal or PR departments, from admitting,
even obliquely, that the software might contain bugs or
that the interface might be suffering from the blinking
twelve problem. They couldn't address users' actual
difficulties. The manuals and websites were therefore
useless, and caused even technically self-assured users
to wonder whether they were going subtly insane.
When Apple engages in this sort of corporate behavior,
one wants to believe that they are really trying their
best. We all want to give Apple the benefit of the doubt,
because mean old Bill Gates kicked the crap out of
them, and because they have good PR. But when Microsoft
does it, one almost cannot help becoming a paranoid
conspiracist. Obviously they are hiding something from
us! And yet they are so powerful! They are trying to drive
us crazy!
This approach to dealing with one's customers was
straight out of the Central European totalitarianism of
the mid-Twentieth Century. The adjectives "Kafkaesque" and
"Orwellian" come to mind. It couldn't last, any more than
the Berlin Wall could, and so now Microsoft has a publicly
available bug database. It's called something else, and
it takes a while to find it, but it's there.
They have, in other words, adapted to the two-tiered
Eloi/Morlock structure of technological society. If you're
an Eloi you install Windows, follow the instructions,
hope for the best, and dumbly suffer when it breaks. If
you're a Morlock you go to the website, tell it that you
are "advanced," find the bug database, and get the truth
straight from some anonymous Microsoft engineer.
But once Microsoft has taken this step, it raises the
question, once again, of whether there is any point
to being in the OS business at all. Customers might be
willing to pay $95 to report a problem to Microsoft if,
in return, they get some advice that no other user is
getting. This has the useful side effect of keeping the
users alienated from one another, which helps maintain
the illusion that bugs are rare aberrations. But once
the results of those bug reports become openly available
on the Microsoft website, everything changes. No one is
going to cough up $95 to report a problem when chances
are good that some other sucker will do it first, and
that instructions on how to fix the bug will then show up,
for free, on a public website. And as the size of the bug
database grows, it eventually becomes an open admission,
on Microsoft's part, that their OSes have just as many
bugs as their competitors'. There is no shame in that; as I
mentioned, Debian's bug database has logged 32,000 reports
so far. But it puts Microsoft on an equal footing with the
others and makes it a lot harder for their customers--who
want to believe--to believe.
MEMENTO MORI
Once the Linux machine has finished spitting out its
jargonic opening telegram, it prompts me to log in with
a user name and a password. At this point the machine
is still running the command line interface, with white
letters on a black screen. There are no windows, menus,
or buttons. It does not respond to the mouse; it doesn't
even know that the mouse is there. It is still possible to
run a lot of software at this point. Emacs, for example,
exists in both a CLI and a GUI version (actually there
are two GUI versions, reflecting some sort of doctrinal
schism between Richard Stallman and some hackers who got
fed up with him). The same is true of many other Unix
programs. Many don't have a GUI at all, and many that do
are capable of running from the command line.
Of course, since my computer only has one monitor screen,
I can only see one command line, and so you might think
that I could only interact with one program at a time. But
if I hold down the Alt key and then hit the F2 function
button at the top of my keyboard, I am presented with a
fresh, blank, black screen with a login prompt at the top
of it. I can log in here and start some other program,
then hit Alt-F1 and go back to the first screen, which
is still doing whatever it was when I left it. Or I can
do Alt-F3 and log in to a third screen, or a fourth,
or a fifth. On one of these screens I might be logged in
as myself, on another as root (the system administrator),
on yet another I might be logged on to some other computer
over the Internet.
Each of these screens is called, in Unix-speak, a tty,
which is an abbreviation for teletype. So when I use my
Linux system in this way I am going right back to that
small room at Ames High School where I first wrote code
twenty-five years ago, except that a tty is quieter and
faster than a teletype, and capable of running vastly
superior software, such as emacs or the GNU development
tools.
It is easy (easy by Unix, not Apple/Microsoft standards)
to configure a Linux machine so that it will go directly
into a GUI when you boot it up. This way, you never
see a tty screen at all. I still have mine boot into the
white-on-black teletype screen however, as a computational
memento mori. It used to be fashionable for a writer to
keep a human skull on his desk as a reminder that he was
mortal, that all about him was vanity. The tty screen
reminds me that the same thing is true of slick user
interfaces.
The X Windows System, which is the GUI of Unix, has to
be capable of running on hundreds of different video
cards with different chipsets, amounts of onboard memory,
and motherboard buses. Likewise, there are hundreds of
different types of monitors on the new and used market,
each with different specifications, and so there
are probably upwards of a million different possible
combinations of card and monitor. The only thing they all
have in common is that they all work in VGA mode, which is
the old command-line screen that you see for a few seconds
when you launch Windows. So Linux always starts in VGA,
with a teletype interface, because at first it has no idea
what sort of hardware is attached to your computer. In
order to get beyond the glass teletype and into the GUI,
you have to tell Linux exactly what kinds of hardware you
have. If you get it wrong, you'll get a blank screen at
best, and at worst you might actually destroy your monitor
by feeding it signals it can't handle.
When I started using Linux this had to be done by hand. I
once spent the better part of a month trying to get an
oddball monitor to work for me, and filled the better
part of a composition book with increasingly desperate
scrawled notes. Nowadays, most Linux distributions ship
with a program that automatically scans the video card and
self-configures the system, so getting X Windows up and
running is nearly as easy as installing an Apple/Microsoft
GUI. The crucial information goes into a file (an ASCII
text file, naturally) called XF86Config, which is worth
looking at even if your distribution creates it for you
automatically. For most people it looks like meaningless
cryptic incantations, which is the whole point of looking
at it. An Apple/Microsoft system needs to have the same
information in order to launch its GUI, but it's apt to
be deeply hidden somewhere, and it's probably in a file
that can't even be opened and read by a text editor. All
of the important files that make Linux systems work are
right out in the open. They are always ASCII text files,
so you don't need special tools to read them. You can
look at them any time you want, which is good, and you can
mess them up and render your system totally dysfunctional,
which is not so good.
At any rate, assuming that my XF86Config file is just
so, I enter the command "startx" to launch the X Windows
System. The screen blanks out for a minute, the monitor
makes strange twitching noises, then reconstitutes
itself as a blank gray desktop with a mouse cursor in
the middle. At the same time it is launching a window
manager. X Windows is pretty low-level software;
it provides the infrastructure for a GUI, and it's
a heavy industrial infrastructure. But it doesn't do
windows. That's handled by another category of application
that sits atop X Windows, called a window manager. Several
of these are available, all free of course. The classic
is twm (Tom's Window Manager) but there is a smaller and
supposedly more efficient variant of it called fvwm,
which is what I use. I have my eye on a completely
different window manager called Enlightenment, which may
be the hippest single technology product I have ever seen,
in that (a) it is for Linux, (b) it is freeware, (c) it is
being developed by a very small number of obsessed hackers,
and (d) it looks amazingly cool; it is the sort of window
manager that might show up in the backdrop of an Aliens
movie.
Anyway, the window manager acts as an intermediary between
X Windows and whatever software you want to use. It draws
the window frames, menus, and so on, while the applications
themselves draw the actual content in the windows. The
applications might be of any sort: text editors, Web
browsers, graphics packages, or utility programs, such
as a clock or calculator. In other words, from this point
on, you feel as if you have been shunted into a parallel
universe that is quite similar to the familiar Apple or
Microsoft one, but slightly and pervasively different. The
premier graphics program under Apple/Microsoft is Adobe
Photoshop, but under Linux it's something called The
GIMP. Instead of the Microsoft Office Suite, you can buy
something called ApplixWare. Many commercial software
packages, such as Mathematica, Netscape Communicator,
and Adobe Acrobat, are available in Linux versions, and
depending on how you set up your window manager you can
make them look and behave just as they would under MacOS
or Windows.
But there is one type of window you'll see on Linux
GUI that is rare or nonexistent under other OSes. These
windows are called "xterm" and contain nothing but lines of
text--this time, black text on a white background, though
you can make them be different colors if you choose. Each
xterm window is a separate command line interface--a tty in
a window. So even when you are in full GUI mode, you can
still talk to your Linux machine through a command-line
interface.
There are many good pieces of Unix software that do not
have GUIs at all. This might be because they were developed
before X Windows was available, or because the people who
wrote them did not want to suffer through all the hassle of
creating a GUI, or because they simply do not need one. In
any event, those programs can be invoked by typing their
names into the command line of an xterm window. The whoami
command, mentioned earlier, is a good example. There is
another called wc ("word count") which simply returns the
number of lines, words, and characters in a text file.
The ability to run these little utility programs on
the command line is a great virtue of Unix, and one
that is unlikely to be duplicated by pure GUI operating
systems. The wc command, for example, is the sort of thing
that is easy to write with a command line interface. It
probably does not consist of more than a few lines of code,
and a clever programmer could probably write it in a single
line. In compiled form it takes up just a few bytes of disk
space. But the code required to give the same program a
graphical user interface would probably run into hundreds
or even thousands of lines, depending on how fancy the
programmer wanted to make it. Compiled into a runnable
piece of software, it would have a large overhead of GUI
code. It would be slow to launch and it would use up a lot
of memory. This would simply not be worth the effort, and
so "wc" would never be written as an independent program
at all. Instead users would have to wait for a word count
feature to appear in a commercial software package.
GUIs tend to impose a large overhead on every single
piece of software, even the smallest, and this overhead
completely changes the programming environment. Small
utility programs are no longer worth writing. Their
functions, instead, tend to get swallowed up into
omnibus software packages. As GUIs get more complex,
and impose more and more overhead, this tendency becomes
more pervasive, and the software packages grow ever
more colossal; after a point they begin to merge with
each other, as Microsoft Word and Excel and PowerPoint
have merged into Microsoft Office: a stupendous software
Wal-Mart sitting on the edge of a town filled with tiny
shops that are all boarded up.
It is an unfair analogy, because when a tiny shop gets
boarded up it means that some small shopkeeper has lost
his business. Of course nothing of the kind happens
when "wc" becomes subsumed into one of Microsoft Word's
countless menu items. The only real drawback is a loss
of flexibility for the user, but it is a loss that most
customers obviously do not notice or care about. The
most serious drawback to the Wal-Mart approach is that
most users only want or need a tiny fraction of what is
contained in these giant software packages. The remainder
is clutter, dead weight. And yet the user in the next
cubicle over will have completely different opinions as
to what is useful and what isn't.
The other important thing to mention, here, is that
Microsoft has included a genuinely cool feature in the
Office package: a Basic programming package. Basic is the
first computer language that I learned, back when I was
using the paper tape and the teletype. By using the version
of Basic that comes with Office you can write your own
little utility programs that know how to interact with all
of the little doohickeys, gewgaws, bells, and whistles in
Office. Basic is easier to use than the languages typically
employed in Unix command-line programming, and Office has
reached many, many more people than the GNU tools. And
so it is quite possible that this feature of Office will,
in the end, spawn more hacking than GNU.
But now I'm talking about application software,
not operating systems. And as I've said, Microsoft's
application software tends to be very good stuff. I don't
use it very much, because I am nowhere near their target
market. If Microsoft ever makes a software package that
I use and like, then it really will be time to dump their
stock, because I am a market segment of one.
GEEK FATIGUE
Over the years that I've been working with Linux I have
filled three and a half notebooks logging my experiences. I
only begin writing things down when I'm doing something
complicated, like setting up X Windows or fooling around
with my Internet connection, and so these notebooks contain
only the record of my struggles and frustrations. When
things are going well for me, I'll work along happily
for many months without jotting down a single note. So
these notebooks make for pretty bleak reading. Changing
anything under Linux is a matter of opening up various of
those little ASCII text files and changing a word here and
a character there, in ways that are extremely significant
to how the system operates.
Many of the files that control how Linux operates are
nothing more than command lines that became so long
and complicated that not even Linux hackers could type
them correctly. When working with something as powerful
as Linux, you can easily devote a full half-hour to
engineering a single command line. For example, the "find"
command, which searches your file system for files that
match certain criteria, is fantastically powerful and
general. Its "man" is eleven pages long, and these are
pithy pages; you could easily expand them into a whole
book. And if that is not complicated enough in and of
itself, you can always pipe the output of one Unix command
to the input of another, equally complicated one. The "pon"
command, which is used to fire up a PPP connection to the
Internet, requires so much detailed information that it is
basically impossible to launch it entirely from the command
line. Instead you abstract big chunks of its input into
three or four different files. You need a dialing script,
which is effectively a little program telling it how to
dial the phone and respond to various events; an options
file, which lists up to about sixty different options on
how the PPP connection is to be set up; and a secrets file,
giving information about your password.
Presumably there are godlike Unix hackers somewhere in
the world who don't need to use these little scripts
and options files as crutches, and who can simply
pound out fantastically complex command lines without
making typographical errors and without having to spend
hours flipping through documentation. But I'm not one of
them. Like almost all Linux users, I depend on having all
of those details hidden away in thousands of little ASCII
text files, which are in turn wedged into the recesses of
the Unix filesystem. When I want to change something about
the way my system works, I edit those files. I know that
if I don't keep track of every little change I've made,
I won't be able to get your system back in working order
after I've gotten it all messed up. Keeping hand-written
logs is tedious, not to mention kind of anachronistic. But
it's necessary.
I probably could have saved myself a lot of headaches
by doing business with a company called Cygnus Support,
which exists to provide assistance to users of free
software. But I didn't, because I wanted to see if I could
do it myself. The answer turned out to be yes, but just
barely. And there are many tweaks and optimizations that I
could probably make in my system that I have never gotten
around to attempting, partly because I get tired of being
a Morlock some days, and partly because I am afraid of
fouling up a system that generally works well.
Though Linux works for me and many other users, its
sheer power and generality is its Achilles' heel. If you
know what you are doing, you can buy a cheap PC from any
computer store, throw away the Windows discs that come with
it, turn it into a Linux system of mind-boggling complexity
and power. You can hook it up to twelve other Linux boxes
and make it into part of a parallel computer. You can
configure it so that a hundred different people can be
logged onto it at once over the Internet, via as many
modem lines, Ethernet cards, TCP/IP sockets, and packet
radio links. You can hang half a dozen different monitors
off of it and play DOOM with someone in Australia while
tracking communications satellites in orbit and controlling
your house's lights and thermostats and streaming live
video from your web-cam and surfing the Net and designing
circuit boards on the other screens. But the sheer power
and complexity of the system--the qualities that make it
so vastly technically superior to other OSes--sometimes
make it seem too formidable for routine day-to-day use.
Sometimes, in other words, I just want to go to
Disneyland.
The ideal OS for me would be one that had a well-designed
GUI that was easy to set up and use, but that included
terminal windows where I could revert to the command line
interface, and run GNU software, when it made sense. A few
years ago, Be Inc. invented exactly that OS. It is called
the BeOS.
ETRE
Many people in the computer business have had a difficult
time grappling with Be, Incorporated, for the simple
reason that nothing about it seems to make any sense
whatsoever. It was launched in late 1990, which makes
it roughly contemporary with Linux. From the beginning
it has been devoted to creating a new operating system
that is, by design, incompatible with all the others
(though, as we shall see, it is compatible with Unix in
some very important ways). If a definition of "celebrity"
is someone who is famous for being famous, then Be is an
anti-celebrity. It is famous for not being famous; it is
famous for being doomed. But it has been doomed for an
awfully long time.
Be's mission might make more sense to hackers than to
other people. In order to explain why I need to explain
the concept of cruft, which, to people who write code,
is nearly as abhorrent as unnecessary repetition.
If you've been to San Francisco you may have seen older
buildings that have undergone "seismic upgrades," which
frequently means that grotesque superstructures of modern
steelwork are erected around buildings made in, say,
a Classical style. When new threats arrive--if we have
an Ice Age, for example--additional layers of even more
high-tech stuff may be constructed, in turn, around these,
until the original building is like a holy relic in a
cathedral--a shard of yellowed bone enshrined in half a
ton of fancy protective junk.
Analogous measures can be taken to keep creaky
old operating systems working. It happens all the
time. Ditching an worn-out old OS ought to be simplified by
the fact that, unlike old buildings, OSes have no aesthetic
or cultural merit that makes them intrinsically worth
saving. But it doesn't work that way in practice. If you
work with a computer, you have probably customized your
"desktop," the environment in which you sit down to work
every day, and spent a lot of money on software that works
in that environment, and devoted much time to familiarizing
yourself with how it all works. This takes a lot of time,
and time is money. As already mentioned, the desire to have
one's interactions with complex technologies simplified
through the interface, and to surround yourself with
virtual tchotchkes and lawn ornaments, is natural and
pervasive--presumably a reaction against the complexity
and formidable abstraction of the computer world. Computers
give us more choices than we really want. We prefer to make
those choices once, or accept the defaults handed to us by
software companies, and let sleeping dogs lie. But when an
OS gets changed, all the dogs jump up and start barking.
The average computer user is a technological antiquarian
who doesn't really like things to change. He or she
is like an urban professional who has just bought a
charming fixer-upper and is now moving the furniture and
knicknacks around, and reorganizing the kitchen cupboards,
so that everything's just right. If it is necessary for
a bunch of engineers to scurry around in the basement
shoring up the foundation so that it can support the new
cast-iron claw-foot bathtub, and snaking new wires and
pipes through the walls to supply modern appliances, why,
so be it--engineers are cheap, at least when millions of
OS users split the cost of their services.
Likewise, computer users want to have the latest Pentium
in their machines, and to be able to surf the web, without
messing up all the stuff that makes them feel as if they
know what the hell is going on. Sometimes this is actually
possible. Adding more RAM to your system is a good example
of an upgrade that is not likely to screw anything up.
Alas, very few upgrades are this clean and simple. Lawrence
Lessig, the whilom Special Master in the Justice
Department's antitrust suit against Microsoft, complained
that he had installed Internet Explorer on his computer,
and in so doing, lost all of his bookmarks--his personal
list of signposts that he used to navigate through the
maze of the Internet. It was as if he'd bought a new set
of tires for his car, and then, when pulling away from
the garage, discovered that, owing to some inscrutable
side-effect, every signpost and road map in the world had
been destroyed. If he's like most of us, he had put a lot
of work into compiling that list of bookmarks. This is
only a small taste of the sort of trouble that upgrades
can cause. Crappy old OSes have value in the basically
negative sense that changing to new ones makes us wish
we'd never been born.
All of the fixing and patching that engineers must do in
order to give us the benefits of new technology without
forcing us to think about it, or to change our ways,
produces a lot of code that, over time, turns into
a giant clot of bubble gum, spackle, baling wire and
duct tape surrounding every operating system. In the
jargon of hackers, it is called "cruft." An operating
system that has many, many layers of it is described as
"crufty." Hackers hate to do things twice, but when they
see something crufty, their first impulse is to rip it out,
throw it away, and start anew.
If Mark Twain were brought back to San Francisco today
and dropped into one of these old seismically upgraded
buildings, it would look just the same to him, with
all the doors and windows in the same places--but if he
stepped outside, he wouldn't recognize it. And--if he'd
been brought back with his wits intact--he might question
whether the building had been worth going to so much
trouble to save. At some point, one must ask the question:
is this really worth it, or should we maybe just tear it
down and put up a good one? Should we throw another human
wave of structural engineers at stabilizing the Leaning
Tower of Pisa, or should we just let the damn thing fall
over and build a tower that doesn't suck?
Like an upgrade to an old building, cruft always seems
like a good idea when the first layers of it go on--just
routine maintenance, sound prudent management. This is
especially true if (as it were) you never look into the
cellar, or behind the drywall. But if you are a hacker who
spends all his time looking at it from that point of view,
cruft is fundamentally disgusting, and you can't avoid
wanting to go after it with a crowbar. Or, better yet,
simply walk out of the building--let the Leaning Tower of
Pisa fall over--and go make a new one THAT DOESN'T LEAN.
For a long time it was obvious to Apple, Microsoft, and
their customers that the first generation of GUI operating
systems was doomed, and that they would eventually need to
be ditched and replaced with completely fresh ones. During
the late Eighties and early Nineties, Apple launched a
few abortive efforts to make fundamentally new post-Mac
OSes such as Pink and Taligent. When those efforts failed
they launched a new project called Copland which also
failed. In 1997 they flirted with the idea of acquiring
Be, but instead they acquired Next, which has an OS called
NextStep that is, in effect, a variant of Unix. As these
efforts went on, and on, and on, and failed and failed and
failed, Apple's engineers, who were among the best in the
business, kept layering on the cruft. They were gamely
trying to turn the little toaster into a multi-tasking,
Internet-savvy machine, and did an amazingly good job of
it for a while--sort of like a movie hero running across
a jungle river by hopping across crocodiles' backs. But
in the real world you eventually run out of crocodiles,
or step on a really smart one.
Speaking of which, Microsoft tackled the same problem in a
considerably more orderly way by creating a new OS called
Windows NT, which is explicitly intended to be a direct
competitor of Unix. NT stands for "New Technology" which
might be read as an explicit rejection of cruft. And
indeed, NT is reputed to be a lot less crufty than
what MacOS eventually turned into; at one point the
documentation needed to write code on the Mac filled
something like 24 binders. Windows 95 was, and Windows 98
is, crufty because they have to be backward-compatible with
older Microsoft OSes. Linux deals with the cruft problem
in the same way that Eskimos supposedly dealt with senior
citizens: if you insist on using old versions of Linux
software, you will sooner or later find yourself drifting
through the Bering Straits on a dwindling ice floe. They
can get away with this because most of the software is
free, so it costs nothing to download up-to-date versions,
and because most Linux users are Morlocks.
The great idea behind BeOS was to start from a clean
sheet of paper and design an OS the right way. And that
is exactly what they did. This was obviously a good idea
from an aesthetic standpoint, but does not a sound business
plan make. Some people I know in the GNU/Linux world are
annoyed with Be for going off on this quixotic adventure
when their formidable skills could have been put to work
helping to promulgate Linux.
Indeed, none of it makes sense until you remember that
the founder of the company, Jean-Louis Gassee, is from
France--a country that for many years maintained its
own separate and independent version of the English
monarchy at a court in St. Germaines, complete with
courtiers, coronation ceremonies, a state religion and
a foreign policy. Now, the same annoying yet admirable
stiff-neckedness that gave us the Jacobites, the force
de frappe, Airbus, and ARRET signs in Quebec, has brought
us a really cool operating system. I fart in your general
direction, Anglo-Saxon pig-dogs!
To create an entirely new OS from scratch, just because
none of the existing ones was exactly right, struck me
as an act of such colossal nerve that I felt compelled to
support it. I bought a BeBox as soon as I could. The BeBox
was a dual-processor machine, powered by Motorola chips,
made specifically to run the BeOS; it could not run any
other operating system. That's why I bought it. I felt
it was a way to burn my bridges. Its most distinctive
feature is two columns of LEDs on the front panel that
zip up and down like tachometers to convey a sense of how
hard each processor is working. I thought it looked cool,
and besides, I reckoned that when the company went out
of business in a few months, my BeBox would be a valuable
collector's item.
Now it is about two years later and I am typing this on
my BeBox. The LEDs (Das Blinkenlights, as they are called
in the Be community) flash merrily next to my right elbow
as I hit the keys. Be, Inc. is still in business, though
they stopped making BeBoxes almost immediately after I
bought mine. They made the sad, but probably quite wise
decision that hardware was a sucker's game, and ported
the BeOS to Macintoshes and Mac clones. Since these used
the same sort of Motorola chips that powered the BeBox,
this wasn't especially hard.
Very soon afterwards, Apple strangled the Mac-clone makers
and restored its hardware monopoly. So, for a while, the
only new machines that could run BeOS were made by Apple.
By this point Be, like Spiderman with his Spider-sense,
had developed a keen sense of when they were about to get
crushed like a bug. Even if they hadn't, the notion of
being dependent on Apple--so frail and yet so vicious--for
their continued existence should have put a fright
into anyone. Now engaged in their own crocodile-hopping
adventure, they ported the BeOS to Intel chips--the same
chips used in Windows machines. And not a moment too
soon, for when Apple came out with its new top-of-the-line
hardware, based on the Motorola G3 chip, they withheld the
technical data that Be's engineers would need to make the
BeOS run on those machines. This would have killed Be,
just like a slug between the eyes, if they hadn't made
the jump to Intel.
So now BeOS runs on an assortment of hardware that is
almost incredibly motley: BeBoxes, aging Macs and Mac
orphan-clones, and Intel machines that are intended
to be used for Windows. Of course the latter type are
ubiquitous and shockingly cheap nowadays, so it would
appear that Be's hardware troubles are finally over. Some
German hackers have even come up with a Das Blinkenlights
replacement: it's a circuit board kit that you can plug
into PC-compatible machines running BeOS. It gives you the
zooming LED tachometers that were such a popular feature
of the BeBox.
My BeBox is already showing its age, as all computers do
after a couple of years, and sooner or later I'll probably
have to replace it with an Intel machine. Even after
that, though, I will still be able to use it. Because,
inevitably, someone has now ported Linux to the BeBox.
At any rate, BeOS has an extremely well-thought-out GUI
built on a technological framework that is solid. It is
based from the ground up on modern object-oriented software
principles. BeOS software consists of quasi-independent
software entities called objects, which communicate by
sending messages to each other. The OS itself is made up
of such objects, and serves as a kind of post office or
Internet that routes messages to and fro, from object
to object. The OS is multi-threaded, which means that
like all other modern OSes it can walk and chew gum at
the same time; but it gives programmers a lot of power
over spawning and terminating threads, or independent
sub-processes. It is also a multi-processing OS, which
means that it is inherently good at running on computers
that have more than one CPU (Linux and Windows NT can also
do this proficiently).
For this user, a big selling point of BeOS is the built-in
Terminal application, which enables you to open up windows
that are equivalent to the xterm windows in Linux. In
other words, the command line interface is available
if you want it. And because BeOS hews to a certain
standard called POSIX, it is capable of running most of
the GNU software. That is to say that the vast array of
command-line software developed by the GNU crowd will work
in BeOS terminal windows without complaint. This includes
the GNU development tools-the compiler and linker. And it
includes all of the handy little utility programs. I'm
writing this using a modern sort of user-friendly text
editor called Pe, written by a Dutchman named Maarten
Hekkelman, but when I want to find out how long it is,
I jump to a terminal window and run "wc."
As is suggested by the sample bug report I quoted earlier,
people who work for Be, and developers who write code
for BeOS, seem to be enjoying themselves more than
their counterparts in other OSes. They also seem to be
a more diverse lot in general. A couple of years ago
I went to an auditorium at a local university to see
some representatives of Be put on a dog-and-pony show. I
went because I assumed that the place would be empty and
echoing, and I felt that they deserved an audience of at
least one. In fact, I ended up standing in an aisle, for
hundreds of students had packed the place. It was like a
rock concert. One of the two Be engineers on the stage was
a black man, which unfortunately is a very odd thing in the
high-tech world. The other made a ringing denunciation of
cruft, and extolled BeOS for its cruft-free qualities, and
actually came out and said that in ten or fifteen years,
when BeOS had become all crufty like MacOS and Windows
95, it would be time to simply throw it away and create a
new OS from scratch. I doubt that this is an official Be,
Inc. policy, but it sure made a big impression on everyone
in the room! During the late Eighties, the MacOS was, for
a time, the OS of cool people-artists and creative-minded
hackers-and BeOS seems to have the potential to attract
the same crowd now. Be mailing lists are crowded with
hackers with names like Vladimir and Olaf and Pierre,
sending flames to each other in fractured techno-English.
The only real question about BeOS is whether or not it is
doomed.
Of late, Be has responded to the tiresome accusation
that they are doomed with the assertion that BeOS is "a
media operating system" made for media content creators,
and hence is not really in competition with Windows at
all. This is a little bit disingenuous. To go back to the
car dealership analogy, it is like the Batmobile dealer
claiming that he is not really in competition with the
others because his car can go three times as fast as theirs
and is also capable of flying.
Be has an office in Paris, and, as mentioned, the
conversation on Be mailing lists has a strongly European
flavor. At the same time they have made strenuous efforts
to find a niche in Japan, and Hitachi has recently begun
bundling BeOS with their PCs. So if I had to make wild
guess I'd say that they are playing Go while Microsoft
is playing chess. They are staying clear, for now,
of Microsoft's overwhelmingly strong position in North
America. They are trying to get themselves established
around the edges of the board, as it were, in Europe and
Japan, where people may be more open to alternative OSes,
or at least more hostile to Microsoft, than they are in
the United States.
What holds Be back in this country is that the smart
people are afraid to look like suckers. You run the risk of
looking naive when you say "I've tried the BeOS and here's
what I think of it." It seems much more sophisticated to
say "Be's chances of carving out a new niche in the highly
competitive OS market are close to nil."
It is, in techno-speak, a problem of mindshare. And in
the OS business, mindshare is more than just a PR issue;
it has direct effects on the technology itself. All of
the peripheral gizmos that can be hung off of a personal
computer--the printers, scanners, PalmPilot interfaces,
and Lego Mindstorms--require pieces of software called
drivers. Likewise, video cards and (to a lesser extent)
monitors need drivers. Even the different types of
motherboards on the market relate to the OS in different
ways, and separate code is required for each one. All
of this hardware-specific code must not only written
but also tested, debugged, upgraded, maintained, and
supported. Because the hardware market has become so vast
and complicated, what really determines an OS's fate is not
how good the OS is technically, or how much it costs, but
rather the availability of hardware-specific code. Linux
hackers have to write that code themselves, and they have
done an amazingly good job of keeping up to speed. Be,
Inc. has to write all their own drivers, though as BeOS
has begun gathering momentum, third-party developers have
begun to contribute drivers, which are available on Be's
web site.
But Microsoft owns the high ground at the moment, because
it doesn't have to write its own drivers. Any hardware
maker bringing a new video card or peripheral device to
market today knows that it will be unsalable unless it
comes with the hardware-specific code that will make it
work under Windows, and so each hardware maker has accepted
the burden of creating and maintaining its own library of
drivers.
MINDSHARE
The U.S. Government's assertion that Microsoft has a
monopoly in the OS market might be the most patently absurd
claim ever advanced by the legal mind. Linux, a technically
superior operating system, is being given away for free,
and BeOS is available at a nominal price. This is simply
a fact, which has to be accepted whether or not you like
Microsoft.
Microsoft is really big and rich, and if some of the
government's witnesses are to be believed, they are not
nice guys. But the accusation of a monopoly simply does
not make any sense.
What is really going on is that Microsoft has seized,
for the time being, a certain type of high ground: they
dominate in the competition for mindshare, and so any
hardware or software maker who wants to be taken seriously
feels compelled to make a product that is compatible with
their operating systems. Since Windows-compatible drivers
get written by the hardware makers, Microsoft doesn't have
to write them; in effect, the hardware makers are adding
new components to Windows, making it a more capable OS,
without charging Microsoft for the service. It is a very
good position to be in. The only way to fight such an
opponent is to have an army of highly competetent coders
who write equivalent drivers for free, which Linux does.
But possession of this psychological high ground is
different from a monopoly in any normal sense of that word,
because here the dominance has nothing to do with technical
performance or price. The old robber-baron monopolies
were monopolies because they physically controlled means
of production and/or distribution. But in the software
business, the means of production is hackers typing code,
and the means of distribution is the Internet, and no one
is claiming that Microsoft controls those.
Here, instead, the dominance is inside the minds of people
who buy software. Microsoft has power because people
believe it does. This power is very real. It makes lots
of money. Judging from recent legal proceedings in both
Washingtons, it would appear that this power and this money
have inspired some very peculiar executives to come out
and work for Microsoft, and that Bill Gates should have
administered saliva tests to some of them before issuing
them Microsoft ID cards.
But this is not the sort of power that fits any normal
definition of the word "monopoly," and it's not amenable
to a legal fix. The courts may order Microsoft to do
things differently. They might even split the company
up. But they can't really do anything about a mindshare
monopoly, short of taking every man, woman, and child
in the developed world and subjecting them to a lengthy
brainwashing procedure.
Mindshare dominance is, in other words, a really odd sort
of beast, something that the framers of our antitrust
laws couldn't possibly have imagined. It looks like one of
these modern, wacky chaos-theory phenomena, a complexity
thing, in which a whole lot of independent but connected
entities (the world's computer users), making decisions
on their own, according to a few simple rules of thumb,
generate a large phenomenon (total domination of the
market by one company) that cannot be made sense of
through any kind of rational analysis. Such phenomena are
fraught with concealed tipping-points and all a-tangle
with bizarre feedback loops, and cannot be understood;
people who try, end up (a) going crazy, (b) giving up,
(c) forming crackpot theories, or (d) becoming high-paid
chaos theory consultants.
Now, there might be one or two people at Microsoft who are
dense enough to believe that mindshare dominance is some
kind of stable and enduring position. Maybe that even
accounts for some of the weirdos they've hired in the
pure-business end of the operation, the zealots who keep
getting hauled into court by enraged judges. But most of
them must have the wit to understand that phenomena like
these are maddeningly unstable, and that there's no telling
what weird, seemingly inconsequential event might cause the
system to shift into a radically different configuration.
To put it another way, Microsoft can be confident that
Thomas Penfield Jackson will not hand down an order that
the brains of everyone in the developed world are to be
summarily re-programmed. But there's no way to predict
when people will decide, en masse, to re-program their own
brains. This might explain some of Microsoft's behavior,
such as their policy of keeping eerily large reserves of
cash sitting around, and the extreme anxiety that they
display whenever something like Java comes along.
I have never seen the inside of the building at Microsoft
where the top executives hang out, but I have this fantasy
that in the hallways, at regular intervals, big red alarm
boxes are bolted to the wall. Each contains a large red
button protected by a windowpane. A metal hammer dangles
on a chain next to it. Above is a big sign reading: IN
THE EVENT OF A CRASH IN MARKET SHARE, BREAK GLASS.
What happens when someone shatters the glass and hits the
button, I don't know, but it sure would be interesting
to find out. One imagines banks collapsing all over
the world as Microsoft withdraws its cash reserves,
and shrink-wrapped pallet-loads of hundred-dollar
bills dropping from the skies. No doubt, Microsoft has
a plan. But what I would really like to know is whether,
at some level, their programmers might heave a big sigh of
relief if the burden of writing the One Universal Interface
to Everything were suddenly lifted from their shoulders.
THE RIGHT PINKY OF GOD
In his book The Life of the Cosmos, which everyone should
read, Lee Smolin gives the best description I've ever
read of how our universe emerged from an uncannily precise
balancing of different fundamental constants. The mass of
the proton, the strength of gravity, the range of the weak
nuclear force, and a few dozen other fundamental constants
completely determine what sort of universe will emerge
from a Big Bang. If these values had been even slightly
different, the universe would have been a vast ocean of
tepid gas or a hot knot of plasma or some other basically
uninteresting thing--a dud, in other words. The only way
to get a universe that's not a dud--that has stars, heavy
elements, planets, and life--is to get the basic numbers
just right. If there were some machine, somewhere, that
could spit out universes with randomly chosen values for
their fundamental constants, then for every universe like
ours it would produce 10^229 duds.
Though I haven't sat down and run the numbers on it, to
me this seems comparable to the probability of making a
Unix computer do something useful by logging into a tty
and typing in command lines when you have forgotten all
of the little options and keywords. Every time your right
pinky slams that ENTER key, you are making another try. In
some cases the operating system does nothing. In other
cases it wipes out all of your files. In most cases it
just gives you an error message. In other words, you get
many duds. But sometimes, if you have it all just right,
the computer grinds away for a while and then produces
something like emacs. It actually generates complexity,
which is Smolin's criterion for interestingness.
Not only that, but it's beginning to look as if, once you
get below a certain size--way below the level of quarks,
down into the realm of string theory--the universe
can't be described very well by physics as it has been
practiced since the days of Newton. If you look at a
small enough scale, you see processes that look almost
computational in nature.
I think that the message is very clear here: somewhere
outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system,
coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind
of hacker-demiurge. The cosmic operating system uses
a command-line interface. It runs on something like a
teletype, with lots of noise and heat; punched-out bits
flutter down into its hopper like drifting stars. The
demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command
line after another, specifying the values of fundamental
constants of physics:
universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34 -protonmass
1.673e-27....
and when he's finished typing out the command line, his
right pinky hesitates above the ENTER key for an aeon
or two, wondering what's going to happen; then down it
comes--and the WHACK you hear is another Big Bang.
Now THAT is a cool operating system, and if such a thing
were actually made available on the Internet (for free,
of course) every hacker in the world would download it
right away and then stay up all night long messing with it,
spitting out universes right and left. Most of them would
be pretty dull universes but some of them would be simply
amazing. Because what those hackers would be aiming for
would be much more ambitious than a universe that had a
few stars and galaxies in it. Any run-of-the-mill hacker
would be able to do that. No, the way to gain a towering
reputation on the Internet would be to get so good at
tweaking your command line that your universes would
spontaneously develop life. And once the way to do that
became common knowledge, those hackers would move on,
trying to make their universes develop the right kind of
life, trying to find the one change in the Nth decimal
place of some physical constant that would give us an
Earth in which, say, Hitler had been accepted into art
school after all, and had ended up his days as a street
artist with cranky political opinions.
Even if that fantasy came true, though, most users
(including myself, on certain days) wouldn't want to
bother learning to use all of those arcane commands, and
struggling with all of the failures; a few dud universes
can really clutter up your basement. After we'd spent a
while pounding out command lines and hitting that ENTER
key and spawning dull, failed universes, we would start to
long for an OS that would go all the way to the opposite
extreme: an OS that had the power to do everything--to
live our life for us. In this OS, all of the possible
decisions we could ever want to make would have been
anticipated by clever programmers, and condensed into
a series of dialog boxes. By clicking on radio buttons
we could choose from among mutually exclusive choices
(HETEROSEXUAL/HOMOSEXUAL). Columns of check boxes would
enable us to select the things that we wanted in our life
(GET MARRIED/WRITE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL) and for more
complicated options we could fill in little text boxes
(NUMBER OF DAUGHTERS: NUMBER OF SONS:).
Even this user interface would begin to look awfully
complicated after a while, with so many choices, and so
many hidden interactions between choices. It could become
damn near unmanageable--the blinking twelve problem all
over again. The people who brought us this operating system
would have to provide templates and wizards, giving us a
few default lives that we could use as starting places for
designing our own. Chances are that these default lives
would actually look pretty damn good to most people, good
enough, anyway, that they'd be reluctant to tear them open
and mess around with them for fear of making them worse. So
after a few releases the software would begin to look
even simpler: you would boot it up and it would present
you with a dialog box with a single large button in the
middle labeled: LIVE. Once you had clicked that button,
your life would begin. If anything got out of whack, or
failed to meet your expectations, you could complain about
it to Microsoft's Customer Support Department. If you got
a flack on the line, he or she would tell you that your
life was actually fine, that there was not a thing wrong
with it, and in any event it would be a lot better after
the next upgrade was rolled out. But if you persisted,
and identified yourself as Advanced, you might get through
to an actual engineer.
What would the engineer say, after you had explained your
problem, and enumerated all of the dissatisfactions in
your life? He would probably tell you that life is a very
hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change
that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker;
and that if you don't like having choices made for you,
you should start making your own.