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

but then "he started going all PC-versus-Mac on me."

What the hell is going on here? And does the operating system business have
a future, or only a past? Here is my view, which is entirely subjective;
but since I have spent a fair amount of time not only using, but
programming, Macintoshes, Windows machines, Linux boxes and the BeOS,
perhaps it is not so ill-informed as to be completely worthless. This is a
subjective essay, more review than research paper, and so it might seem
unfair or biased compared to the technical reviews you can find in PC
magazines. But ever since the Mac came out, our operating systems have been
based on metaphors, and anything with metaphors in it is fair game as far
as I'm concerned.


MGBs, TANKS, AND BATMOBILES

Around the time that Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, and Allen were dreaming up these
unlikely schemes, I was a teenager living in Ames, Iowa. One of my friends'
dads had an old MGB sports car rusting away in his garage. Sometimes he
would actually manage to get it running and then he would take us for a
spin around the block, with a memorable look of wild youthful exhiliration
on his face; to his worried passengers, he was a madman, stalling and
backfiring around Ames, Iowa and eating the dust of rusty Gremlins and
Pintos, but in his own mind he was Dustin Hoffman tooling across the Bay
Bridge with the wind in his hair.

In retrospect, this was telling me two things about people's relationship
to technology. One was that romance and image go a long way towards shaping
their opinions. If you doubt it (and if you have a lot of spare time on
your hands) just ask anyone who owns a Macintosh and who, on those grounds,
imagines him- or herself to be a member of an oppressed minority group.

The other, somewhat subtler point, was that interface is very important.
Sure, the MGB was a lousy car in almost every way that counted: balky,
unreliable, underpowered. But it was fun to drive. It was responsive. Every
pebble on the road was felt in the bones, every nuance in the pavement
transmitted instantly to the driver's hands. He could listen to the engine
and tell what was wrong with it. The steering responded immediately to
commands from his hands. To us passengers it was a pointless exercise in
going nowhere--about as interesting as peering over someone's shoulder
while he punches numbers into a spreadsheet. But to the driver it was an
experience. For a short time he was extending his body and his senses into
a larger realm, and doing things that he couldn't do unassisted.

The analogy between cars and operating systems is not half bad, and so let
me run with it for a moment, as a way of giving an executive summary of our
situation today.

Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are situated.
One of them (Microsoft) is much, much bigger than the others. It started