In the Beginning...Was the Command Line
by Neal Stephenson · first published 1999
47% recommend49% neutral4% critical
Why HN recommends it
Witty long-form essay on why GUIs displaced the CLI, built on extended analogies (Hole Hawg power drill, cars like MGBs and Batmobiles, Morlocks and Eloi). Suits anyone curious about OS and interface culture.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
This is "the Word" -- one man's word, certainly -- about the art (and artifice) of the state of our computer-centric existence. And considering that the "one man" is Neal Stephenson, "the hacker Hemingway" (Newsweek) -- acclaimed novelist, pragmatist, seer, nerd-friendly philosopher, and nationally bestselling author of groundbreaking literary works (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, etc., etc.) -- the word is well worth hearing. Mostly well-reasoned examination and partial rant, Stephenson's In the Beginning...was the Command Line is a thoughtful, irreverent, hilarious treatise on the cyber-culture
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Decent article, but I think that Joel should have worked in a reference to Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" as well.
on “Differences in the Windows and Unix cultures” ↗…SunView and X10R4 and the blit and gnot and perq are kind of out there. I liked the perq. And Ultrix. I think Stephenson has kind of walked off the reservation a bit. Even plan9 fanatics use a gui. "In the beginning was the command line" is better.
on “Unix – The Hole Hawg of Operating Systems (1999)” ↗This reminds me of that great essay by Neal Stephenson called "In the Beginning was the Command Line".[1] In it, he compares Unix to an industrial strength screwdriver called the "Hole Hawg". "But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. The Hole Hawg is dangerous because it does exactly what…
on “The truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid (1981) [pdf]” ↗…fruition. Negroponte also came up with the One Laptop Per Child which lost it's relevance in a world of smartphones. Others I thought of were Neal Stephenson (his non-fiction works are awesome, especially In the Beginning... was the Command Line and that book-long article he wrote for Wired about wiring Cambodia). Stephenson's fiction is great too and puts William Gibson to shame when it comes to cyberpunk, but Gibson wrote his prior to the PC…
on “Alvin Toffler, Author of ‘Future Shock,’ Dies at 87” ↗Reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s great essay, ”In the Beginning Was the Command Line”. http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html
on “Marp: Markdown Presentation Writer” ↗…accomplished this by dominating that market). If Sony, for example, had gotten ahold of BeOS and tried to vertically integrate in a manner similar to Apple, they could have been a contender. Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning Was the Command Line has quite a lot of interesting observations about BeOS during its prime. http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html
on “BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X” ↗…most familiar with. Here's an alternative: http://tldp.org/LDP/LG/issue45/orr.html (The punchline to the Linux airline is priceless, I think.) Edit: If you like this sort of humor, Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line" has a great extended analogy where operating systems are car dealerships. A link and a snippet: Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are situated. One of them (Microsoft) is much,…
on “If Version Control Systems were Airlines” ↗I coincidentally reread In the Beginning was the Command Line three days ago. Neal Stephenson is an awesome geek.
on “Stephenson's "Spew": Social Media in 1993 coming true today?” ↗Snow Crash and In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson both introduced me to tech culture in different ways with the same result: it got me more excited about tech than anything else and made me realize that I had to work in tech, and also…
on “Ask HN: Books that changed your life?” ↗A nice essay on this topic by Neal Stephenson. In the Beginning was the Command Line http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.sht...
on “Life on the Command Line” ↗This article assumes the reader already knows a lot about the CLI. A much better introduction to the commandline is Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line." Read it here: http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
on “To understand the command line... ” ↗See Neal Stephenson's IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE COMMAND LINE. It's all symbol manipulation.
on “The Elements Of Style: Unix As Literature (1998)” ↗Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line" is a more in depth take on this topic: http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
on “The power of the command-line as a programming environment” ↗…which I think you should read anyway. Reflections on Trusting Trust: This is required reading for... Everybody. It describes a particularly insidious hack, and discusses its ramifications for security. In the Beginning Was The Command Line: If you want get into interface design, programming, or ever work with computers, this is required. It's a snapshot of the 90's, a discussion of operating systems, corporations, and society as we know…
on “Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?” ↗…summer. Fantastic. I still have my copy. "Code" by Charles Petzold, 2000 There's a new edition as of 2022. I love Petzold's writing. If you did anything Win32 at the end of the 90s you probably did too. "In the Beginning... was the Command Line." Neal Stephenson, 1999 I remember this book being fun to read. It was the time when acolytes of Stallman ran amok and Windows was doomed to perish leaving Linux to inherit the world.
on “The Joy of Computer History Books” ↗