"In the Beginning was the Command Line" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stephenson Neal)

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,