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Stephenson Counter Rant
A while ago we ran a link to Neal Stephenson's bit
on In the Beginning there was
the Command Line. Nick
Arnett has written a
counter rant
to that piece that you will probably find worth reading
if you enjoyed Neal's original piece.
It wasn't Jobs' "infinite wisdom" that scrapped the Intel port... by 1990, Jobs was long gone from Apple, had nothing to do with its decisions, and owned only one share of stock. Those were the Sculley years, when Apple was being run into the ground by a marketing hack from Pepsi.
At that point, Jobs was busy with a little project called NeXT, which was producing almost-affordable workstations with the best GUI ever sold commercially (some of you might use AfterStep for a WM... that's a NeXTStep knockoff), a BSD Unix base, 17+" monitors, CD-quality stereo sound, Display PostScript (true wysiwyg)... in other words, a decade ahead of their time. If the NeXT had ever found a big enough market niche, the world would be very different today.
Actually, though, i don't fault the lack of an Intel port for the Mac's failure then. Intel hardware was not (IS not) sufficiently mature for MacOS. I personally lay the blame at not providing protected memory and preemptive multitasking for System 7, at a time when Apple was abandoning the older hardware that couldn't support it. Of course, Apple dedicated its next-generation resources to Pink (Taligent), which suffered Death By Design.
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
Milwaukee, Bosch, Makita, etc. do now sell the low end of their contractor-grade equipment through homeowner hells. They also sell consumer-grade products with the same _name_ as the high end stuff. I would imagine the margin on those sales props up entire product lines quite nicely. But they also have true high end products that are sold only through contractor supply stores and a few catalogs.
As with just about everything in modern society, the aura of mystery and power about this type of equipment is gradually fading as more information becomes available and more channels open up to the average joe, and the Internet is playing a large part in that. But I believe Stephenson's description of the Hole Hawg was and remains pretty accurate.
I have also known a few kids who have grown up with contractor (or auto mechanic) parents, and in the cases where the parents were actively engaged in passing on knowledge to their kids, the result was pretty much as Stephenson imagines. The accuracy of that vigenette was fairly telling, I thought.
It remains to be seen, though, whether this applies to computers or not. My 7 y.o. is pretty active with the PC, and he showed me some tricks I didn't know in Win95 the other day. But what I do at work is so far beyond what we do on the Wintel box at home, and so abstract, that I doubt I am passing much/any of my accumulated knowledge on to him. Anyone else have a different experience?
sPh
I know he's not a real hacker (I'm not either, for that matter), but he seems a WHOLE lot more hackerish than any other sci-fi writer or tech-reporter I've ever read. From the back of Snow Crash (which I bought because of In the Beginning):
[Stephenson] began his higher education as a physics major, then switched to geography when it appeared that this would enable him to scam more free time on his university's mainframe computer.
If that's not an old-school hacker, what is?
Ok, I loved Neal Stephnson's essay. Sure, it had problems, but that's not going to stop me from fanatically defending it :)
1. Stephenson's point was not that GUIs are bad. Maybe he got the history wrong, but he got the important part. The people at PARC were not trying to hide the workings of the computer behind a graphical interface. They were trying to enhance the computer through a graphical interface. This is not what Apple and Microsoft do, though they may pretend to. What they do is hide the computer behind the interface. This is what Stephenson says is bad. Arnett's example of weather tries to set up Stephenson as saying something he's not. It would be a valid analogy if looking at a weather report somehow prevented you from looking at the indivdual molecules in the atmosphere. Stephenson is not against GUIs. He's against them replacing CLIs. Come on, can anybody who likes Enlightenment be against GUIs? Oh, the irony that Arnett mentions the straw-man argument in his essay!
2. In most cases, selling stock is really selling equity, but this is a technology stock we're talking about. With these things, the price of the stock is several orders of magnitude times earnings. Usually you would be selling equity, but with high-tech stocks (especially now with e-trading), it really is like financing a loan. Microsoft does not have that much equity. You would have to be pretty naive to believe that the stock market (especially the high-tech stuff) can sustain itself at that level. It's unsunstainable, therefore it's not really selling equity and can be seen, as Stephenson chooses, as financing a loan against the future burst of the bubble.
3. What, pray tell, is the difference between Bill Gates "winning" and Micrsoft having bigger profits? Is there such an important distinction? His obligation is not short-term profits but long-term profits, which seems to be the same thing as "winning" in most cases.
4. Arnett says that it's not price or features that OSes compete on, but momentum. He then says it's phenomenal that Linux has such momentum so young. But what about when Linux first started out? It had zero momentum. According to this theory, it should still have zero momentum, but we all know that's false. It has competed on features and price. Also look at Windows 98. It's not necassary for anything. You can still use 95. Did people buy it? Yes. Why? Not because they had to. They did it becaus OSes compete on price (ok, 98 loses there), feaures (yeah, they seem to the average consumer to do well there), and marketing (which Stephenson mentions, but not in the same place). And I'm willing to bet that if Hurd shapes up, people will use it. If it shapes up well, it people will use it instead of Linux, or *BSD, or whatever. Open source reduces the impact of momentum, as we've seen many times.
5. Stephenson was not entirely against the Disneyfication process. I recall him saying it was better that a million people see the Disneyfied temple than that 10,000 cardiovascular surgeons go see the real thing for the same amount of money.
The whirlpool/chaos metaphor is at least as confusing/misleaing as any metaphor Stephenson uses." what do you get if you break a whirlpool into pieces?" This is misleading. Breaking up Micrsoft would have an impact. The point of the antitrust case is that they not be allowed to expand their monopoly into other areas, causing things to stagnate. Arnett says Micrsoft does not own the internet. True, it doesn't now. That's the point. We shouldn' let them own the Internet. Breaking the division of Microsoft that deals with OSes from the part that deals with the Internet would help (look back to Arnett's argument about momentum; without the OS division behind it, MS-Internet would not have the unfair momentum)
The use of the chaos example is particularly interesting. Arnett claims that we can find simple things from the general in a chaotic system. Ok, I'll buy that. But the reverse in a chaotic system is that you can't understand what the whole will look like from some of the pieces. This is not what a computer should be like, and that's part of Stephenson's arguments. I should be bottom-up, not top-down. We should be understanding computers from the simple parts and then extrapolating the big picture (with the help of a GUI if necessary). Arnett says that we should be understing the big picture (through the GUI) and from that inferring the underlying system. Me, I'll take the former system. It gives me more information. It's my computer, and I don't want to have to guess what's going on. True, dragging an icon may represent mounds of complexity, but I prefer the GNOME/KDE dragging, where I can know what the dragging means, to the Microsoft/Apple dragging, where it's all abstracted behind recognition.
There, I'm sure I have lots of holes. I like this. Arnett wrote a good piece in response to (what I believe to be) a better piece. Now I've written a worse piece than Arnett. Now someone reply to me. I like this.
I doubt Neal Stephenson would argue against the value of a GUI for a 3D-modeling program, or for a web-browser. I imagine he uses X all the time. Rather, he argues against having just a GUI, particularly for system management and development.
In a sense, every control in a GUI is a menu: you are presented options of what to do and you pick one. You don't need much experience but you are limited to those options which are presented. The interface does the work of your memory, but less efficiently. In a command line, you are given no information about what is possible, but all operations are available instantly if you learn their names and options, all without searching the screen with your eyes.
I do agree with some points in the counter-rant, but some of the metaphors were more appropriate than Stephenson probably intended. You can't drive a tank through town, and while towns and cities are a small percentage of the world they are where most people spend most of their time. Most weekend handymen wouldn't want a hole hawg.
IMHO, the average user won't want Linux until you hide the most powerful tools from him, including the command line. I still think most business users would be better off with a black-box system where the 3-6 applications they regularly run are offered in a menu which is the whole interface to the system, or better yet, integrated into one application that automatically starts when they turn on the computer and saves everything (without overwriting the originals) when they turn it off.
Neil Stephenson sure seems like a hacker to me. He describes himself in the "Command Line" essay as a long-time Mac programmer, and writes that he's been a Linux user since 1995. (Not to mention his mention that he acquired one of the first BeBoxen, which we can assume he didn't buy under the illusion that he was getting a better television-typewriter on which to peck out his novels.)
t ml)
He wrote the best article ever to appear in Wired Magazine (okay, so maybe that's a low bar; how about "probably the best major-publication tech article I've read"), which is about the whos/hows/whys of large-scale fiber projects. That article demonstrated Stephenson's firm grasp of the technical -- in addition to the social and historical -- issues at hand. ("Mother Earth Mother Board." Cover story for December 1996, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.h
Finally, and to me most importantly, Stephenson's two novels that revolve around digital technologies and information manipulation ring unfailingly true, from the throwaway descriptions of how programming works (Hiro in the lifeboat building a motorcycle mostly by taking bits and pieces of old code and repurposing them), to effortless explanation of means and mechanism (the dog with an atavistic protect-the-boy impulse inside a crenellated, heat-diffusing body; Nell's book creating Turing World for her), to large-scale examination of the idea that computers offer us powerful new ways to conceptualize that activity which most defines and shapes us as humans, the manipulation of abstract symbols (the Babylonian/ur-language theme of _Snow Crash_; the info/bio/nano-tech merging conceit in _The Diamond Age_.)
All three of the above strengths were sadly lacking in, for example, "The Matrix," which was much and loudly praised here.
As eagerly as I await my copy of _Cryptonomicon_, I would be even more interested to learn that a collection of Stephenson non-fiction was in the offing. My favorite part of "Command Line" was actually the short digression about Disney World. I'm betting there's a draft of something as amazing as the DFW "E Unibus Plurum" essay that Stephenson cites somewhere on one of his (many) hard drives.