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In The Beginning Was The Command Line, Updated

Posted by timothy on from the keeping-up-with-things dept.

Unqualified code-monkey Garote submits his annotated version of Neal Stephenson's In The Beginning Was The Command Line, updated to discuss UI design theory and fill in some of the gaps from the last five years. (And yes, he has been granted permission from Neal to do this.) There's plenty more to cover of course: Will the command-line last only as long as the keyboard? How will desktop search technology change our workflow? What about the 3D interface? Scroll to any random paragraph in the essay and you'll find something worth expounding on. What's ahead for the next five years?

5 of 416 comments (clear)

  1. From the 3D Interface Article: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Evolution optimized homo sapiens for wandering the savannah - moving around a plane - and not swinging through the trees. Today this evolutionary bias shows in comparing the number of people who drive a car versus the number of helicopter pilots: 2D navigation (on the ground) vs. 3D navigation (in the air)."

    What absolute, total, bollocks. Cost of helicopters vs cost of cars has not figured into this tit's thoughts, then?

  2. Re:I thought it was something else... by Criffer · · Score: 5, Funny

    Punch cards? You were lucky! All we had were toggle switches where you programmed individual bits; one at a time, until memory were full. All 512 bytes of it!

  3. I remember my ole cobol prof. by roegerle · · Score: 5, Funny

    "The only good thing about windows is I can run multiple sessions of DOS."

  4. Re:the command line already survived the keyboard by timster · · Score: 5, Funny

    You have to specify "tea" so that it doesn't replicate up a grey Earl ("Earl, Grey")

    You have to specify "hot" because the company that makes the replicators lost a lawsuit.

    --
    I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
  5. Monty Python jokes aside... by BrokenHalo · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I have been a big fan of the original article for many years, and much of it is still relevant.

    The marginalia referred to in this thread don't amount to much; they lack continuity with the article, and come across as the querulous interjections of an adolescent schoolboy. The commentator has a number of valid points (which I don't dispute), but he has a long way to go before he approaches Stephenson's calibre as a writer.

    Bottom line: if anybody is going to "revisit" the article, my preference would be for the original author to do so.