Is this the origin of the classic analogy that Windows is a station wagon, Mac OS is a European luxury sedan, and Linux is a free tank? I had no idea that the author Neal Stephenson came up with that.<p>The analogy is definitely a bit outdated now, what with Windows 8 then 10 then 11 getting aggressively less user-friendly each year.
Is Microsoft Windows more like a Ford Pinto with an exploding gas tank, a Lada, or what? I can't think of any car that's ever been sold whose design was optimized to spy on its users and trick them into buying to things and agreeing to contracts they didn't want.<p>The Takata airbags that inflated at random, killing 26 people, seem similarly harmful (if to a far smaller number of people), but that's an <i>unintentional</i> defect. Unlike the recent Windows 11 screw-tightening, Takata responded by recalling the product, not making it explode more frequently.
From my experience riding in them and news reports I've read, any tesla fits the bill<p>Sadly, the most reliable signal american tech companies send is that they are primarily concerned with building a surveillance state. Whether this is for the US government or just their own fiefdoms (franchulates?) seems to vary a lot both within and between them, but neither prospect is particularly appealing to me as a prospective customer and/or target
> the most reliable signal american tech companies send is that they are primarily concerned with building a surveillance state<p>Sagacious point. With emphasising. This is how non-European web business look to everyone.
Yep, Tesla was my first thought as well.
> I can't think of any car that's ever been sold whose design was optimized to spy on its users and trick them into buying to things and agreeing to contracts they didn't want.<p>I've ridden in people's cars that are still displaying "agree to the terms of service"; I think a number of cars are starting to become far too much like computers.
Those terms of service used to be "you should keep your eyes on the road, we are not responsible if you have a crash while playing with your satnav/entertainment system" and "you're responsible for where you drive, so we are not responsible if the satnav tells you to drive off a cliff or into a closed road".<p>But now that we've trained users that they'll need to click accept on the screen, we can sneak any conditions we want in there about how we collect and use their data...
As a wise man once said, “Anything + computer = computer.”
Windows Vista had suicide doors
> I can't think of any car that's ever been sold whose design was optimized to spy on its users and trick them into buying to things and agreeing to contracts they didn't want.<p>Just give it a couple of years.
>like a Ford Pinto with an exploding gas tank"<p>This bit of libel needs to be put to bed. The Pinto did not have a greater propensity to explode than other "in-class" cars and arguably had a better safety record than Beetles or Corollas of the time. Nader made himself a nice career of this libel, but it does not make it true. Of course, other cars didn't have a "memo" but that's beside the point.
There is unsurprisingly an extensive account at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Fuel_system_fires,_recalls,_and_litigation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Fuel_system_fires,_...</a>
"These works reviewed misunderstandings related to the actual number of fire-related deaths related to the fuel system design, "wild and unsupported claims asserted in Pinto Madness and elsewhere",[65] the facts of the related legal cases, Grimshaw vs Ford Motor Company and State of Indiana vs Ford Motor Company, the applicable safety standards at the time of design, and the nature of the NHTSA investigations and subsequent vehicle recalls.[66] One described the Grimshaw case as "mythical" due to several significant factual misconceptions and their effect on the public's understanding."
that Pinto Madness led to exaggerated claims does not mean that the Pinto was either safe or as safe as other cars, just that a car with an unsafe record had a worse reputation. The Pinto had a problem with its gas tank when it was rear ended. If you think other cars also had problems, feel free to name them. But that doesn't make the Pinto safe when it was rear ended, and it wasn't safe because the gas tank was in the rear and vulnerable.
Various cars did (any of the vehicles with the gas tank mounted above the rear axle), some also had issues with side impact (GM square body trucks).<p>The 'crime' of the pinto was not that it was an unsafe car (it wasn't), it was that it could have been <i>safer</i> with a minimal (even by my standards, and I'm on the record as being opposed to mandatory backup cameras) increase in cost - that was why it grew the reputation, it was pure cost engineering (aka, cheapness - on the same level as the ignition switch failure issue GM had in the 2000's).<p>People died, a fair number of them - because Ford didn't want to spend an additional amount of money - less than 50USD in today's money - on a car that retailed for 15,000USD in todays money.
Apple is a shitty 3-series BMW, windows is a used Lexus that’s been in 3 accidents, and Linux is a 25 year old f250 that’s been a farm truck its whole life.
I'd say Apple is a 50's CHEVROLET CORVETTE. Breaks down less than Windows and has less intrusive technology (like ads, AI, ect.)
At least historically Apple would also have to run slower, while still costing much more than Windows. If a part gave you trouble you'd be forced to buy parts from the dealership and they'd sometimes tell you that you needed a new car when the same part on Windows could be repaired or replaced cheaply by any repair shop. You'd only be able to drive the Apple car on a handful of toll roads, although they were well paved while windows cars could be driven all over the place for free, even off-road if necessary, although that often resulted in flat tires making a triple A membership necessary and leading to a common misconception that apple was immune to flats.
I think the hate for Microsoft is more based on its popularity rather than Apple being "better". Both have dubious business practices.
Ads in the start menu? Apple constantly pushes iCloud and related subscriptions. Market abuse? Apple is well known to remake and then block competing apps from competitors. Stability? Everyone knows the spinning beachball of death but acts like it never happens. User unfriendly? Apple constanly modifies its hardware to hurt independent repair outlets.<p>I don't have that rosy 50's Chevy picture, it's more like a luxury coupe with a tighly locked hood. Sleek, desirable, you pay through the nose for every upgrade, and don't attempt to fix it yourself.
10 years ago I’d have agreed. Today it’s a shitty 3-series.
> Linux is a 25 year old f250 that’s been a farm truck its whole life<p>... that someone occassionally decides to wrap with a shiny covering to make it look like a luxury SUV. The covering sometimes peels off when travelling on the highway.
Not people who like their work trucks.
Depends very much on the choice of the endless combinations something linux-based enables.<p>I didn't have it crap on me ever, since about two years, by choice of a so called 'rolling' gamer distro.<p>Looks very nice and comfy to me with KDE Plasma, and its Breeze (light) style, which is "automagically" applied to apps written for other toolkits/DEs like GTK/Gnome. Everything of what I do(mostly just browsing, some LibreOffice, remoting into other systems) is running ultrasmooth without lag, or stuttering, while almost always some music plays via YT in the background, without resorting to solutions which would pipe that via yt-dlp into mpv. It isn't necessary for me. On obsolete systems with Kaby Lake Core i5/7t :-) The only thing which could be called special or unusual about them, is that they have 32GB RAM. That may help, too. Oh, and the BIOS/UEFI/Firmware, from Lenovo.<p>Just don't buy crap.
Don’t forget about the BeOS being the Batmobile!
Have it in print. Fondly remember BeOS in the second half of the nineties; still have second-generation BeBox. I was amongst those who were dismayed when Apple “didn’t choose Plan B” and instead acquired NeXT (that I also had experience with, and whose hardware and software I adored, but that just didn’t “feel right” for the whole “multimedia convergence” visible on the horizon ahead). Guess I was wrong, but I still dote on my Batmobile, and the interface is so perfectly “nineties zany grunge” in retrospect: as chiselled as Motif but with a define nod to Keith Haring.<p>Anyway, an awesome and prescient book.<p>Anathem, Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle… Neal Stephenson is an absolute master of his craft, though he is famous for failing to stick the landings sometimes.
BeOS was so amazing; I ran it for a while on x86 hardware. Ahead of its time. But I always loved NeXT. (I'd go down to the local university computer store to drool over them. The staff all knew me by name.) And now, I carry one around with me everywhere I go. Living in the future...
Have you tried Haiku recently?
Yes, I’ve been watching them and running their builds for… fifteen to twenty years now. It’s gone from an effort to reimplement a fairly prescient OS to basically an exercise in software archeology, since even achieving the project’s goals of a fully compatible reinplentation will be so severely limited compared to modern-day OSes it won’t be in any way ‘competitive’ with what is broadly available now, for free (free Linux tanks now have railguns as artillery, antigravity regulators instead of tracks, are built out of magical titanium foam alloys that can protect better while weighing less… you get the point). They have all the sci-fi tech of the erstwhile Batmobile and are on the lot with the keys in the ignition and a sign that reads “take me”.
"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."<p>Still true 25 years later!
> 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.<p>Is this… right?<p>I thought some of the earliest mechanical computers (as opposed to human computers) that had much real uptake were “fire control computers,” for things like naval guns (for example). You move around dials and cranks to put the measurements in. I’d call this essentially graphical… it isn’t a series of text based commands that you issue, but a collection of intuitive UI elements, each of which is used to communicate a particular piece of data to the computer. Of course the GUI of the past was made of gages and levers instead of pixels, but that’s just an implementation detail.<p>I much prefer the command line to a gui, but I think we should call it what it is: an improvement. A much more precise and repeatable way of talking to the computer, in comparison to cranking cranks and poking dials. And a general, endlessly flexible channel that can represent basically any type of information, at the cost of not necessary being intuitive or glance-able.
This is absolutely right.<p>The teletype system was invented shortly after 1900. It was in widespread commercial use by the 1920s, for sending text over telegraph wires.<p>The US government began using punch card machines to do the census in 1890. They were named Hollerith machines. Hollerith is one of the companies that later became IBM. When they entered into electronic computers, their prime market was their own customers who were already using their punch card machines for things like accounting and payroll. For backwards compatibility, they kept the format the same!<p>Punch cards themselves date back to the early very 1800s, where they were introduced for the Jacquard loom. With the cards providing programmable instructions for fabric design.<p>It is worth noting that Hollerith was not the first place to try to repurpose punch cards to computation. That honor goes to Babbage's analytical machine (which admittedly was not actually completed).<p>Basically everything in technology has a far longer and richer history than people realize. I could go on for a while about this...
Still, one might distinguish from batch computing and interactive. Sending commands via teletype didn't really happen until well after interactive TUIs -- the text based system relating to punch cards was a separate machine that prepared cards for calculation in a separate batch process.<p>Gun Fire Control might be more interactive and predates ENIAC (which was, of course, initially used to calculate artillery trajectory). ENIAC's user interface was plugging wires from outputs to inputs same as telephone operators connecting calls. Hardly interactive.<p>I don't think we get to REPL/TUI like features until 1960s, you've got Sutherland's Sketchpad with a CRT and lightpen representing GUI and LISP REPL via Teletype just before it 1959ish (actually I'm trying to find an old video I saw demo'ing LISP or APL being used interactively by teletype, it's the earliest kind of terminal I've seen)
While the immediate interactivity of these old systems was technically limited, the way that people thought about them was more flexible than you might expect. Try reading <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...</a>. Written in the waning days of WW 2 (Germany had surrendered, Japan had not), it is the first recorded proposal of hypertext. The vision described is extremely interactive.<p>Interestingly, it is also the original description of the science citation index. When this was later combined with hypertext, the result was Google's PageRank system...<p>Now how could someone in 1945 be that visionary about how computers could be used some day? Well you see, he'd been in computers for nearly 20 years, and had been thinking about this system off and on for around a decade, in between real jobs like being in charge of R&D for the USA during WW 2...<p>If you fast forward to the 1960s, everyone should watch the Mother of all Demos. That was possible in 1968. In some ways it was better integrated than what we put up with today...
This is a terminological confusion. The "computers" you're describing gave their name to the universal symbol manipulators we now call "computers" because, historically, the universal symbol manipulators were originally funded to perform mathematical calculations. They don't have much else in common. The "computers" that Stephenson is talking about are the universal symbol manipulators, the smallest and most limited of which can boot Linux: <a href="https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=35.%20Linux4004" rel="nofollow">https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=35.%20Linux4004</a>
In this context I believe 'computer' refers to only general purpose computing devices, not fixed function calculation machines.<p>In some sense, early player pianos (IIRC with holes in paper that controlled key presses) weren't computers, but were a related precursor technology / infrastructure.
"The cosmic operating system uses a command-line interface."<p>"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."<p>At the same time, there will be uncool operating systems designed for data collection, surveillance and ad services
Timely. In the age of AI, the command line is more relevant than ever..
Great stuff. I always love technical fluff about the history and philiosophy of operating systems
previously <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41084795">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41084795</a>
It's an HN favourite, that's just 2024, there's also:<p>2020 (179 points, 64 comments) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24998305">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24998305</a><p>2019 (148 points, 50 comments) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20684764">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20684764</a><p>2018 (102 points, 13 comments) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16843739">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16843739</a><p>2016 (145 points, 55 comments) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12469797">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12469797</a><p>2008 (24 points, 12 comments) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=408226">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=408226</a>
Thanks! Macroexpanded:<p><i>In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41084795">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41084795</a> - July 2024 (260 comments)<p><i>In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314225">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314225</a> - Aug 2023 (2 comments)<p><i>In the Beginning Was the Command Line</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29373944">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29373944</a> - Nov 2021 (4 comments)<p><i>In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24998305">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24998305</a> - Nov 2020 (64 comments)<p><i>In the beginning was the command line (1999) [pdf]</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20684764">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20684764</a> - Aug 2019 (50 comments)<p><i>In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16843739">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16843739</a> - April 2018 (13 comments)<p><i>In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12469797">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12469797</a> - Sept 2016 (54 comments)<p><i>In the beginning was the command line</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11385647">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11385647</a> - March 2016 (1 comment)<p><i>In the Beginning was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=408226">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=408226</a> - Dec 2008 (12 comments)<p><i>In the beginning was the command line by Neil Stephenson</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95912">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95912</a> - Jan 2008 (5 comments)<p><i>In the Beginning Was the Command Line</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47566">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47566</a> - Aug 2007 (2 comments)<p>(Reposts are fine after a year or so, and in the case of perennials like this one, it's good to have a thread every once in a while so newer user cohorts learn what the classics are.)
> Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"<p>> Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"<p>Literally every conversation I have had with people where I have tried to get them to use Linux :').
I absolutely love this article, but every time I see it do the rounds online I have to nitpick at least one thing from it. Last time it was the anecdote about MPW[0], and today I'm going to nitpick the car metaphor.<p>The metaphors for Windows and MacOS are swapped. Windows' technical underpinnings were - from the start - way better than Apple's. Microsoft actually bothered to copy everything from XEROX PARC, albeit poorly, while Apple saw the fancy windows-and-desktop UI and ignored the object system underpinning it. This isn't me making a jab at Apple - Jobs himself said it when he was at NeXT. Windows 95 and NT also both brought memory protection to the existing Windows API. Apple had spent several years trying and failing to build a memory protected Mac OS before just giving up and buying NeXT.<p>The correct metaphors are:<p>- Someone working at the phone company secretly designs a tram (UNIX). They're actually prohibited from selling vehicles, but they license the design under the table to a bunch of universities. A bunch of tram manufacturers make trams based off the phone company design.<p>- A wheel factory (Microsoft) sells wheels for bicycles. Bicycle dealerships crop up everywhere using their wheels. Even the railroads (IBM) want to get in on it, and they ship a terrible bike that everyone copies because it's the railway bike.<p>- Phone company designed trams are really popular and every city has like five of them. Except they keep breaking down and all the control cabs are just slightly different, so it pisses off the operators. Some kids at Berkeley try to make their own standard tram design (BSD) but they get sued by the phone company and nobody uses it.<p>- A car dealership (XEROX) moves in. They sell SUVs (Xerox STAR). They cost $100k each, and they only sell them in huge fleets to big corporations because XEROX wants to compete with the railroad. Nobody buys them and they leave town, but not before giving a demo of their tech to the last bicycle dealer (Apple) not using the railway design.<p>- The bicycle dealership decides to build their own SUV (Lisa) and a moped (Mac). The SUV is a huge flop while the moped is a minor success. Their CEO gets fired by the board and starts a trucking company (NeXT).<p>- A homeless man that lives on public transit and thinks vehicles should be free starts working on his own tram (GNU), but he overengineers the engine (Hurd) and it doesn't work at all. Still, he's not being sued by the phone company, so people start putting his parts into their trams anyway.<p>- The wheel factory learned how to make a moped from selling wheels to the moped dealer. So they sell their own moped upgrade kit (Windows). It works with any bicycle, but it looks like shit, even though it has the same power as an SUV engine.<p>- The wheel factory also starts work on a joint venture with the local railroad to produce their own trucks (OS/2). They can't agree on anything and divorce after a few years.<p>- Turns out mopeds suck! They break down constantly and need an oil change every 400 miles. The moped dealer starts work on a station wagon (Copland). A prototype is produced that's about as elegant as The Homer. It is unceremoniously cancelled.<p>- The wheel factory <i>also</i> has problems with their moped kits breaking down, but since they sold a lot more of them, <i>they're</i> the ones getting the reputation of selling an unreliable vehicle. They decide to design a truck of their own (Windows NT) and a car made out of moped parts (Windows 95) and sell the design to all the bicycle (now car) dealers.<p>- The moped company is ridiculed by the car dealers and nobody buys their elegantly designed mopeds. They wind up buying the trucking company.<p>- Someone in Finland designs an electric motor (Linux) that happens to fit in the homeless guy's tram. People hail this as a revolution in public transport, even though cities are full of NIMBYs who tore down the tramways and put in buses that ride worse and get delayed in traffic.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24998305">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24998305</a>
> A homeless man that lives on public transit and thinks vehicles should be free starts working on his own tram (GNU), but he overengineers the engine (Hurd) and it doesn't work at all. Still, he's not being sued by the phone company, so people start putting his parts into their trams anyway.<p>> Someone in Finland designs an electric motor (Linux) that happens to fit in the homeless guy's tram. People hail this as a revolution in public transport, even though cities are full of NIMBYs who tore down the tramways and put in buses that ride worse and get delayed in traffic.<p>It's so easy to forget just how strange the actual history seems when zoomed out a bit. It sounds so absurd that this is the story of the OS I'm writing this comment on, but yet here I am doing it!
> Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems.<p>Please. They resold an already existing OS created by another individual. The idea that there was some "vision" here in being an IBM contractor is a total misunderstanding of the history of the time.
The “strange” products they created to sell for money, were implementations of programming languages. When most software was (1) supplied by the large company that sold the large computer it ran on, (2) was written on one of those machines by the people who were going to use it, or (3) was hobby stuff, shared freely between hobbyists.<p>The latter made sense, since taking and giving back to the community was a natural and fair system. Which served everyone, while obligating no one. And in any case, how would you charge for something with no physical form and that anyone can copy?
what kept Microsoft alive in the post-BASIC pre-OS era was actually sales of the SoftCard, a hardware card which put a Z80 microprocessor into an Apple II so Apple owners could run CP/M software like S-100 machines. It was the brainchild of Paul Allen, and was about the biggest market share CP/M platform there was.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-80_SoftCard" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-80_SoftCard</a>
Arguably this started in the mainframe world in 1969, with IBM "unbundling" software and services from hardware sales, after the US government launched an antitrust suit against them.
I understand this part to be more about the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists</a>
> Please. They resold an already existing OS created by another individual. The idea that there was some "vision" here in being an IBM contractor is a total misunderstanding of the history of the time.<p>Imagine how different the world might be if gates’ mom didn’t work at ibm.
Don't go down this road. It's so tempting to believe that everything is just luck and circumstance. It gives us an excuse to not bother trying. We all have that voice inside that seductively tells us that we don't need to try so hard; that it's all just luck, and we shouldn't waste our energy. This is the equivalent of refusing medical care because "God will provide."<p>I met Bill Gates a couple of times at Microsoft. He wasn't an average man who got lucky. He was/is a hard-working, extraordinarily brilliant man who got lucky.<p>I know the playing field is not level. We don't all have an equal chance to be a billionaire. But I do know that most of us have not reached our full potential. Most of us could be better (on whatever dimension you desire) if only we tried harder.<p>Imagine how different the world might be if we did.
she didn't. she was on a united way charity comittee with an ibm executive
Potato, po-tato?
Somewhat different, I think. She had no direct financial interest in IBM's decision; she convinced the guy at IBM to look at Bill for the PC's operating system. Sure, at that level favors and family can have a lot of influence, but there wasn't a direct business relationship.
Or his dad at Planned Parenthood
You missed the point. Selling an operating system <i>at all</i> was the innovation, rather than having it just come with the hardware. That the operating system they came up with the crazy idea to sell was <i>someone else’s</i> operating system is just an implementation detail, following the age old pattern of stealing others’ work industrialized decades earlier by Thomas Edison and thus requiring no innovation at all.
Classic. Due for another read to see how it’s holding up in the AI era.
How things have changed, late 90s, early 2000 was an exciting in Linux Land. Now, not as much excitement.