This is reprinted from a textfile that was on http://www.cryptonomicon.com,
the advertising page for Neal's book "Cryptonomicon." It was removed a while
ago, so I felt that it would be worthwhile to reprint it here.
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:
C R Y P T O N O M I C O N
 |
|
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.