"In the Beginning
was the Command Line"
By Neal Stephenson
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
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, 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 out years ago selling three-speed bicycles
(MS-DOS); these were not perfect, but they worked, and when they
broke you could easily fix them.
There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one
day began selling motorized vehicles--expensive but attractively
styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how
they worked was something of a mystery.
The big dealership responded by rushing a moped upgrade kit (the
original Windows) onto the market. This was a Rube Goldberg
contraption that, when bolted onto a three-speed bicycle, enabled
it to keep up, just barely, with Apple-cars. The users had to wear
goggles and were always picking bugs out of their teeth while Apple
owners sped along in hermetically sealed comfort, sneering out the
windows. But the Micro-mopeds were cheap, and easy to fix compared
with the Apple-cars, and their market share waxed.
Eventually the big dealership came out with a full-fledged car: a
colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic
appeal of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew
gaskets, and it was an enormous success. A little later, they also
came out with a hulking off-road vehicle intended for industrial
users (Windows NT) which was no more beautiful than the station
wagon, and only a little more reliable.
Since then there has been a lot of noise and shouting, but little
has changed. The smaller dealership continues to sell sleek
Euro-styled sedans and to spend a lot of money on advertising
campaigns. They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in
their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and
curly. The big one keeps making bigger and bigger station wagons
and ORVs.
On the other side of the road are two competitors that have come
along more recently.
One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the
BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the
Euro-sedans, better designed, more technologically advanced, and at
least as reliable as anything else on the market--and yet cheaper
than the others.
With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and
which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees,
and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus.
The people who live there are making tanks. These are not
old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1
tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with
sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are
better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that
they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to
use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact
car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific
pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the
road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb
into one and drive it away for free.
Customers come to this crossroads in throngs, day and night. Ninety
percent of them go straight to the biggest dealership and buy
station wagons or off-road vehicles. They do not even look at the
other dealerships.
Of the remaining ten percent, most go and buy a sleek Euro-sedan,
pausing only to turn up their noses at the philistines going to buy
the station wagons and ORVs. If they even notice the people on the
opposite side of the road, selling the cheaper, technically
superior vehicles, these customers deride them cranks and
half-wits.
The Batmobile outlet sells a few vehicles to the occasional car nut
who wants a second vehicle to go with his station wagon, but seems
to accept, at least for now, that it's a fringe player.
The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive because it is
staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the edge of the street
with bullhorns, trying to draw customers' attention to this
incredible situation. A typical conversation goes something like
this:
Hacker with bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free
tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at
ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"
Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is
true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"
Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"
Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something
goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring
it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room
for hours, listening to elevator music."
Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send
volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"
Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!"
Bullhorn: "But..."
Buyer: "Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
BIT-FLINGER
The connection between cars, and ways of interacting with
computers, wouldn't have occurred to me at the time I was being
taken for rides in that MGB. I had signed up to take a computer
programming class at Ames High School. After a few introductory
lectures, we students were granted admission into a tiny room
containing a teletype, a telephone, and an old-fashioned modem
consisting of a metal box with a pair of rubber cups on the top
(note: many readers, making their way through that last sentence,
probably felt an initial pang of dread that this essay was about to
turn into a tedious, codgerly reminiscence about how tough we had
it back in the old days; rest assured that I am actually
positioning my pieces on the chessboard, as it were, in preparation
to make a point about truly hip and up-to-the minute topics like
Open Source Software). The teletype was exactly the same sort of
machine that had been used, for decades, to send and receive
telegrams. It was basically a loud typewriter that could only
produce UPPERCASE LETTERS. Mounted to one side of it was a smaller
machine with a long reel of paper tape on it, and a clear plastic
hopper underneath.
In order to connect this device (which was not a computer at all)
to the Iowa State University mainframe across town, you would pick
up the phone, dial the computer's number, listen for strange
noises, and then slam the handset down into the rubber cups. If
your aim was true, one would wrap its neoprene lips around the
earpiece and the other around the mouthpiece, consummating a kind
of informational soixante-neuf. The teletype would shudder as it
was possessed by the spirit of the distant mainframe, and begin to
hammer out cryptic messages.
Since computer time was a scarce resource, we used a sort of batch
processing technique. Before dialing the phone, we would turn on
the tape puncher (a subsidiary machine bolted to the side of the
teletype) and type in our programs. Each time we depressed a key,
the teletype would bash out a letter on the paper in front of us,
so we could read what we'd typed; but at the same time it would
convert the letter into a set of eight binary digits, or bits, and
punch a corresponding pattern of holes across the width of a paper
tape. The tiny disks of paper knocked out of the tape would flutter
down into the clear plastic hopper, which would slowly fill up what
can only be described as actual bits. On the last day of the school
year, the smartest kid in the class (not me) jumped out from behind
his desk and flung several quarts of these bits over the head of
our teacher, like confetti, as a sort of semi-affectionate
practical joke. The image of this man sitting there, gripped in the
opening stages of an atavistic fight-or-flight reaction, with
millions of bits (megabytes) sifting down out of his hair and into
his nostrils and mouth, his face gradually turning purple as he
built up to an explosion, is the single most memorable scene from
my formal education.
Anyway, it will have been obvious that my interaction with the
computer was of an extremely formal nature, being sharply divided
up into different phases, viz.: (1) sitting at home with paper and
pencil, miles and miles from any computer, I would think very, very
hard about what I wanted the computer to do, and translate my
intentions into a computer language--a series of alphanumeric
symbols on a page. (2) I would carry this across a sort of
informational cordon sanitaire (three miles of snowdrifts) to
school and type those letters into a machine--not a computer--which
would convert the symbols into binary numbers and record them
visibly on a tape. (3) Then, through the rubber-cup modem, I would
cause those numbers to be sent to the university mainframe, which
would (4) do arithmetic on them and send different numbers back to
the teletype. (5) The teletype would convert these numbers back
into letters and hammer them out on a page and (6) I, watching,
would construe the letters as meaningful symbols.
The division of responsibilities implied by all of this is
admirably clean: computers do arithmetic on bits of information.
Humans construe the bits as meaningful symbols. But this
distinction is now being blurred, or at least complicated, by the
advent of modern operating systems that use, and frequently abuse,
the power of metaphor to make computers accessible to a larger
audience. Along the way--possibly because of those metaphors, which
make an operating system a sort of work of art--people start to get
emotional, and grow attached to pieces of software in the way that
my friend's dad did to his MGB.
People who have only interacted with computers through graphical
user interfaces like the MacOS or Windows--which is to say, almost
everyone who has ever used a computer--may have been startled, or
at least bemused, to hear about the telegraph machine that I used
to communicate with a computer in 1973. But there was, and is, a
good reason for using this particular kind of technology. Human
beings have various ways of communicating to each other, such as
music, art, dance, and facial expressions, but some of these are
more amenable than others to being expressed as strings of symbols.
Written language is the easiest of all, because, of course, it
consists of strings of symbols to begin with. If the symbols happen
to belong to a phonetic alphabet (as opposed to, say, ideograms),
converting them into bits is a trivial procedure, and one that was
nailed, technologically, in the early nineteenth century, with the
introduction of Morse code and other forms of telegraphy.
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.
These embodied two fundamentally different approaches to computing.
When you were using cards, you'd punch a whole stack of them and
run them through the reader all at once, which was called batch
processing. You could also do batch processing with a teletype, as
I have already described, by using the paper tape reader, and we
were certainly encouraged to use this approach when I was in high
school. But--though efforts were made to keep us unaware of
this--the teletype could do something that the card reader could
not. On the teletype, once the modem link was established, you
could just type in a line and hit the return key. The teletype
would send that line to the computer, which might or might not
respond with some lines of its own, which the teletype would hammer
out--producing, over time, a transcript of your exchange with the
machine. This way of doing it did not even have a name at the time,
but when, much later, an alternative became available, it was
retroactively dubbed the Command Line Interface.
When I moved on to college, I did my computing in large, stifling
rooms where scores of students would sit in front of slightly
updated versions of the same machines and write computer programs:
these used dot-matrix printing mechanisms, but were (from the
computer's point of view) identical to the old teletypes. By that
point, computers were better at time-sharing--that is, mainframes
were still mainframes, but they were better at communicating with a
large number of terminals at once. Consequently, it was no longer
necessary to use batch processing. Card readers were shoved out
into hallways and boiler rooms, and batch processing became a
nerds-only kind of thing, and consequently took on a certain
eldritch flavor among those of us who even knew it existed. We were
all off the Batch, and on the Command Line, interface now--my very
first shift in operating system paradigms, if only I'd known it.
A huge stack of accordion-fold paper sat on the floor underneath
each one of these glorified teletypes, and miles of paper shuddered
through their platens. Almost all of this paper was thrown away or
recycled without ever having been touched by ink--an ecological
atrocity so glaring that those machines soon replaced by video
terminals--so-called "glass teletypes"--which were quieter and
didn't waste paper. Again, though, from the computer's point of
view these were indistinguishable from World War II-era teletype
machines. In effect we still used Victorian technology to
communicate with computers until about 1984, when the Macintosh was
introduced with its Graphical User Interface. Even after that, the
Command Line continued to exist as an underlying stratum--a sort of
brainstem reflex--of many modern computer systems all through the
heyday of Graphical User Interfaces, or GUIs as I will call them
from now on.
GUIs
Now the first job that any coder needs to do when writing a new
piece of software is to figure out how to take the information that
is being worked with (in a graphics program, an image; in a
spreadsheet, a grid of numbers) and turn it into a linear string of
bytes. These strings of bytes are commonly called files or
(somewhat more hiply) streams. They are to telegrams what modern
humans are to Cro-Magnon man, which is to say the same thing under
a different name. All that you see on your computer screen--your
Tomb Raider, your digitized voice mail messages, faxes, and word
processing documents written in thirty-seven different
typefaces--is still, from the computer's point of view, just like
telegrams, except much longer, and demanding of more arithmetic.
The quickest way to get a taste of this is to fire up your web
browser, visit a site, and then select the View/Document Source
menu item. You will get a bunch of computer code that looks
something like this:
Welcome to the Avon Books Homepage
This crud is called HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and it is
basically a very simple programming language instructing your web
browser how to draw a page on a screen. Anyone can learn HTML and
many people do. The important thing is that no matter what splendid
multimedia web pages they might represent, HTML files are just
telegrams.
When Ronald Reagan was a radio announcer, he used to call baseball
games by reading the terse descriptions that trickled in over the
telegraph wire and were printed out on a paper tape. He would sit
there, all by himself in a padded room with a microphone, and the
paper tape would eke out of the machine and crawl over the palm of
his hand printed with cryptic abbreviations. If the count went to
three and two, Reagan would describe the scene as he saw it in his
mind's eye: "The brawny left-hander steps out of the batter's box
to wipe the sweat from his brow. The umpire steps forward to sweep
the dirt from home plate." and so on. When the cryptogram on the
paper tape announced a base hit, he would whack the edge of the
table with a pencil, creating a little sound effect, and describe
the arc of the ball as if he could actually see it. His listeners,
many of whom presumably thought that Reagan was actually at the
ballpark watching the game, would reconstruct the scene in their
minds according to his descriptions.
This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are
the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is
Ronald Reagan. The same is true of Graphical User Interfaces in
general.
So an OS is a stack of metaphors and abstractions that stands
between you and the telegrams, and embodying various tricks the
programmer used to convert the information you're working with--be
it images, e-mail messages, movies, or word processing
documents--into the necklaces of bytes that are the only things
computers know how to work with. When we used actual telegraph
equipment (teletypes) or their higher-tech substitutes ("glass
teletypes," or the MS-DOS command line) to work with our computers,
we were very close to the bottom of that stack. When we use most
modern operating systems, though, our interaction with the machine
is heavily mediated. Everything we do is interpreted and translated
time and again as it works its way down through all of the
metaphors and abstractions.
The Macintosh OS was a revolution in both the good and bad senses
of that word. Obviously it was true that command line interfaces
were not for everyone, and that it would be a good thing to make
computers more accessible to a less technical audience--if not for
altruistic reasons, then because those sorts of people constituted
an incomparably vaster market. It was clear the the Mac's engineers
saw a whole new country stretching out before them; you could
almost hear them muttering, "Wow! We don't have to be bound by
files as linear streams of bytes anymore, vive la revolution, let's
see how far we can take this!" No command line interface was
available on the Macintosh; you talked to it with the mouse, or not
at all. This was a statement of sorts, a credential of
revolutionary purity. It seemed that the designers of the Mac
intended to sweep Command Line Interfaces into the dustbin of
history.
My own personal love affair with the Macintosh began in the spring
of 1984 in a computer store in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, when a friend of
mine--coincidentally, the son of the MGB owner--showed me a
Macintosh running MacPaint, the revolutionary drawing program. It
ended in July of 1995 when I tried to save a big important file on
my Macintosh Powerbook and instead instead of doing so, it
annihilated the data so thoroughly that two different disk crash
utility programs were unable to find any trace that it had ever
existed. During the intervening ten years, I had a passion for the
MacOS that seemed righteous and reasonable at the time but in
retrospect strikes me as being exactly the same sort of goofy
infatuation that my friend's dad had with his car.
The introduction of the Mac triggered a sort of holy war in the
computer world. Were GUIs a brilliant design innovation that made
computers more human-centered and therefore accessible to the
masses, leading us toward an unprecedented revolution in human
society, or an insulting bit of audiovisual gimcrackery dreamed up
by flaky Bay Area hacker types that stripped computers of their
power and flexibility and turned the noble and serious work of
computing into a childish video game?
This debate actually seems more interesting to me today than it did
in the mid-1980s. But people more or less stopped debating it when
Microsoft endorsed the idea of GUIs by coming out with the first
Windows. At this point, command-line partisans were relegated to
the status of silly old grouches, and a new conflict was touched
off, between users of MacOS and users of Windows.
There was plenty to argue about. The first Macintoshes looked
different from other PCs even when they were turned off: they
consisted of one box containing both CPU (the part of the computer
that does arithmetic on bits) and monitor screen. This was billed,
at the time, as a philosophical statement of sorts: Apple wanted to
make the personal computer into an appliance, like a toaster. But
it also reflected the purely technical demands of running a
graphical user interface. In a GUI machine, the chips that draw
things on the screen have to be integrated with the computer's
central processing unit, or CPU, to a far greater extent than is
the case with command-line interfaces, which until recently didn't
even know that they weren't just talking to teletypes.
This distinction was of a technical and abstract nature, but it
became clearer when the machine crashed (it is commonly the case
with technologies that you can get the best insight about how they
work by watching them fail). When everything went to hell and the
CPU began spewing out random bits, the result, on a CLI machine,
was lines and lines of perfectly formed but random characters on
the screen--known to cognoscenti as "going Cyrillic." But to the
MacOS, the screen was not a teletype, but a place to put graphics;
the image on the screen was a bitmap, a literal rendering of the
contents of a particular portion of the computer's memory. When the
computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result
was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken
television set--a "snow crash."
And even after the introduction of Windows, the underlying
differences endured; when a Windows machine got into trouble, the
old command-line interface would fall down over the GUI like an
asbestos fire curtain sealing off the proscenium of a burning
opera. When a Macintosh got into trouble it presented you with a
cartoon of a bomb, which was funny the first time you saw it.
And these were by no means superficial differences. The reversion
of Windows to a CLI when it was in distress proved to Mac partisans
that Windows was nothing more than a cheap facade, like a garish
afghan flung over a rotted-out sofa. They were disturbed and
annoyed by the sense that lurking underneath Windows' ostensibly
user-friendly interface was--literally--a subtext.
For their part, Windows fans might have made the sour observation
that all computers, even Macintoshes, were built on that same
subtext, and that the refusal of Mac owners to admit that fact to
themselves seemed to signal a willingness, almost an eagerness, to
be duped.
Anyway, a Macintosh had to switch individual bits in the memory
chips on the video card, and it had to do it very fast, and in
arbitrarily complicated patterns. Nowadays this is cheap and easy,
but in the technological regime that prevailed in the early 1980s,
the only realistic way to do it was to build the motherboard (which
contained the CPU) and the video system (which contained the memory
that was mapped onto the screen) as a tightly integrated
whole--hence the single, hermetically sealed case that made the
Macintosh so distinctive.
When Windows came out, it was conspicuous for its ugliness, and its
current successors, Windows 95 and Windows NT, are not things that
people would pay money to look at either. Microsoft's complete
disregard for aesthetics gave all of us Mac-lovers plenty of
opportunities to look down our noses at them. That Windows looked
an awful lot like a direct ripoff of MacOS gave us a burning sense
of moral outrage to go with it. Among people who really knew and
appreciated computers (hackers, in Steven Levy's non-pejorative
sense of that word) and in a few other niches such as professional
musicians, graphic artists and schoolteachers, the Macintosh, for a
while, was simply the computer. It was seen as not only a superb
piece of engineering, but an embodiment of certain ideals about the
use of technology to benefit mankind, while Windows was seen as a
pathetically clumsy imitation and a sinister world domination plot
rolled into one. So very early, a pattern had been established that
endures to this day: people dislike Microsoft, which is okay; but
they dislike it for reasons that are poorly considered, and in the
end, self-defeating.
CLASS STRUGGLE ON THE DESKTOP
Now that the Third Rail has been firmly grasped, it is worth
reviewing some basic facts here: like any other publicly traded,
for-profit corporation, Microsoft has, in effect, borrowed a bunch
of money from some people (its stockholders) in order to be in the
bit business. As an officer of that corporation, Bill Gates has one
responsibility only, which is to maximize return on investment. He
has done this incredibly well. Any actions taken in the world by
Microsoft-any software released by them, for example--are basically
epiphenomena, which can't be interpreted or understood except
insofar as they reflect Bill Gates's execution of his one and only
responsibility.
It follows that if Microsoft sells goods that are aesthetically
unappealing, or that don't work very well, it does not mean that
they are (respectively) philistines or half-wits. It is because
Microsoft's excellent management has figured out that they can make
more money for their stockholders by releasing stuff with obvious,
known imperfections than they can by making it beautiful or
bug-free. This is annoying, but (in the end) not half so annoying
as watching Apple inscrutably and relentlessly destroy itself.
Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net,
and it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is
too powerful, and disdainful people who think it's tacky. This is
all strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism,
when the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles,
because they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because
of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments. Microsoft is the
very embodiment of modern high-tech prosperity--it is, in a word,
bourgeois--and so it attracts all of the same gripes.
The opening "splash screen" for Microsoft Word 6.0 summed it up
pretty neatly: when you started up the program you were treated to
a picture of an expensive enamel pen lying across a couple of
sheets of fancy-looking handmade writing paper. It was obviously a
bid to make the software look classy, and it might have worked for
some, but it failed for me, because the pen was a ballpoint, and
I'm a fountain pen man. If Apple had done it, they would've used a
Mont Blanc fountain pen, or maybe a Chinese calligraphy brush. And
I doubt that this was an accident. Recently I spent a while
re-installing Windows NT on one of my home computers, and many
times had to double-click on the "Control Panel" icon. For reasons
that are difficult to fathom, this icon consists of a picture of a
clawhammer and a chisel or screwdriver resting on top of a file
folder.
These aesthetic gaffes give one an almost uncontrollable urge to
make fun of Microsoft, but again, it is all beside the point--if
Microsoft had done focus group testing of possible alternative
graphics, they probably would have found that the average mid-level
office worker associated fountain pens with effete upper management
toffs and was more comfortable with ballpoints. Likewise, the
regular guys, the balding dads of the world who probably bear the
brunt of setting up and maintaining home computers, can probably
relate better to a picture of a clawhammer--while perhaps harboring
fantasies of taking a real one to their balky computers.
This is the only way I can explain certain peculiar facts about the
current market for operating systems, such as that ninety percent
of all customers continue to buy station wagons off the Microsoft
lot while free tanks are there for the taking, right across the
street.
A string of ones and zeroes was not a difficult thing for Bill
Gates to distribute, one he'd thought of the idea. The hard part
was selling it--reassuring customers that they were actually
getting something in return for their money.
Anyone who has ever bought a piece of software in a store has had
the curiously deflating experience of taking the bright
shrink-wrapped box home, tearing it open, finding that it's 95
percent air, throwing away all the little cards, party favors, and
bits of trash, and loading the disk into the computer. The end
result (after you've lost the disk) is nothing except some images
on a computer screen, and some capabilities that weren't there
before. Sometimes you don't even have that--you have a string of
error messages instead. But your money is definitely gone. Now we
are almost accustomed to this, but twenty years ago it was a very
dicey business proposition. Bill Gates made it work anyway. He
didn't make it work by selling the best software or offering the
cheapest price. Instead he somehow got people to believe that they
were receiving something in exchange for their money.
The streets of every city in the world are filled with those
hulking, rattling station wagons. Anyone who doesn't own one feels
a little weird, and wonders, in spite of himself, whether it might
not be time to cease resistance and buy one; anyone who does, feels
confident that he has acquired some meaningful possession, even on
those days when the vehicle is up on a lift in an auto repair shop.
All of this is perfectly congruent with membership in the
bourgeoisie, which is as much a mental, as a material state. And it
explains why Microsoft is regularly attacked, on the Net, from both
sides. People who are inclined to feel poor and oppressed construe
everything Microsoft does as some sinister Orwellian plot. People
who like to think of themselves as intelligent and informed
technology users are driven crazy by the clunkiness of Windows.
Nothing is more annoying to sophisticated people to see someone who
is rich enough to know better being tacky--unless it is to realize,
a moment later, that they probably know they are tacky and they
simply don't care and they are going to go on being tacky, and
rich, and happy, forever. Microsoft therefore bears the same
relationship to the Silicon Valley elite as the Beverly Hillbillies
did to their fussy banker, Mr. Drysdale--who is irritated not so
much by the fact that the Clampetts moved to his neighborhood as by
the knowledge that, when Jethro is seventy years old, he's still
going to be talking like a hillbilly and wearing bib overalls, and
he's still going to be a lot richer than Mr. Drysdale.
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. The reason was that Apple was and is a hardware
company, while Microsoft was and is a software company. Apple
therefore had a monopoly on hardware that could run MacOS, whereas
Windows-compatible hardware came out of a free market. The free
market seems to have decided that people will not pay for
cool-looking computers; PC hardware makers who hire designers to
make their stuff look distinctive get their clocks cleaned by
Taiwanese clone makers punching out boxes that look as if they
belong on cinderblocks in front of someone's trailer. But Apple
could make their hardware as pretty as they wanted to and simply
pass the higher prices on to their besotted consumers, like me.
Only last week (I am writing this sentence in early Jan. 1999) the
technology sections of all the newspapers were filled with
adulatory press coverage of how Apple had released the iMac in
several happenin' new colors like Blueberry and Tangerine.
Apple has always insisted on having a hardware monopoly, except for
a brief period in the mid-1990s when they allowed clone-makers to
compete with them, before subsequently putting them out of
business. Macintosh hardware was, consequently, expensive. You
didn't open it up and fool around with it because doing so would
void the warranty. In fact the first Mac was specifically designed
to be difficult to open--you needed a kit of exotic tools, which
you could buy through little ads that began to appear in the back
pages of magazines a few months after the Mac came out on the
market. These ads always had a certain disreputable air about them,
like pitches for lock-picking tools in the backs of lurid detective
magazines.
This monopolistic policy can be explained in at least three
different ways.
THE CHARITABLE EXPLANATION is that the hardware monopoly policy
reflected a drive on Apple's part to provide a seamless, unified
blending of hardware, operating system, and software. There is
something to this. It is hard enough to make an OS that works well
on one specific piece of hardware, designed and tested by engineers
who work down the hallway from you, in the same company. Making an
OS to work on arbitrary pieces of hardware, cranked out by rabidly
entrepeneurial clonemakers on the other side of the International
Date Line, is very difficult, and accounts for much of the troubles
people have using Windows.
THE FINANCIAL EXPLANATION is that Apple, unlike Microsoft, is and
always has been a hardware company. It simply depends on revenue
from selling hardware, and cannot exist without it.
THE NOT-SO-CHARITABLE EXPLANATION has to do with Apple's corporate
culture, which is rooted in Bay Area Baby Boomdom.
Now, since I'm going to talk for a moment about culture, full
disclosure is probably in order, to protect myself against
allegations of conflict of interest and ethical turpitude: (1)
Geographically I am a Seattleite, of a Saturnine temperament, and
inclined to take a sour view of the Dionysian Bay Area, just as
they tend to be annoyed and appalled by us. (2) Chronologically I
am a post-Baby Boomer. I feel that way, at least, because I never
experienced the fun and exciting parts of the whole Boomer
scene--just spent a lot of time dutifully chuckling at Boomers'
maddeningly pointless anecdotes about just how stoned they got on
various occasions, and politely fielding their assertions about how
great their music was. But even from this remove it was possible to
glean certain patterns, and one that recurred as regularly as an
urban legend was the one about how someone would move into a
commune populated by sandal-wearing, peace-sign flashing flower
children, and eventually discover that, underneath this facade, the
guys who ran it were actually control freaks; and that, as living
in a commune, where much lip service was paid to ideals of peace,
love and harmony, had deprived them of normal, socially approved
outlets for their control-freakdom, it tended to come out in other,
invariably more sinister, ways.
Applying this to the case of Apple Computer will be left as an
exercise for the reader, and not a very difficult exercise.
It is a bit unsettling, at first, to think of Apple as a control
freak, because it is completely at odds with their corporate image.
Weren't these the guys who aired the famous Super Bowl ads showing
suited, blindfolded executives marching like lemmings off a cliff?
Isn't this the company that even now runs ads picturing the Dalai
Lama (except in Hong Kong) and Einstein and other offbeat rebels?
It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they have been
able to plant this image of themselves as creative and rebellious
free-thinkers in the minds of so many intelligent and
media-hardened skeptics really gives one pause. It is testimony to
the insidious power of expensive slick ad campaigns and, perhaps,
to a certain amount of wishful thinking in the minds of people who
fall for them. It also raises the question of why Microsoft is so
bad at PR, when the history of Apple demonstrates that, by writing
large checks to good ad agencies, you can plant a corporate image
in the minds of intelligent people that is completely at odds with
reality. (The answer, for people who don't like Damoclean
questions, is that since Microsoft has won the hearts and minds of
the silent majority--the bourgeoisie--they don't give a damn about
having a slick image, any more then Dick Nixon did. "I want to
believe,"--the mantra that Fox Mulder has pinned to his office wall
in The X-Files--applies in different ways to these two companies;
Mac partisans want to believe in the image of Apple purveyed in
those ads, and in the notion that Macs are somehow fundamentally
different from other computers, while Windows people want to
believe that they are getting something for their money, engaging
in a respectable business transaction).
In any event, as of 1987, both MacOS and Windows were out on the
market, running on hardware platforms that were radically different
from each other--not only in the sense that MacOS used Motorola CPU
chips while Windows used Intel, but in the sense--then overlooked,
but in the long run, vastly more significant--that the Apple
hardware business was a rigid monopoly and the Windows side was a
churning free-for-all.
But the full ramifications of this did not become clear until very
recently--in fact, they are still unfolding, in remarkably strange
ways, as I'll explain when we get to Linux. The upshot is that
millions of people got accustomed to using GUIs in one form or
another. By doing so, they made Apple/Microsoft a lot of money. The
fortunes of many people have become bound up with the ability of
these companies to continue selling products whose salability is
very much open to question.
HONEY-POT, TAR-PIT, WHATEVER
When Gates and Allen invented the idea of selling software, they
ran into criticism from both hackers and sober-sided
businesspeople. Hackers understood that software was just
information, and objected to the idea of selling it. These
objections were partly moral. The hackers were coming out of the
scientific and academic world where it is imperative to make the
results of one's work freely available to the public. They were
also partly practical; how can you sell something that can be
easily copied? Businesspeople, who are polar opposites of hackers
in so many ways, had objections of their own. Accustomed to selling
toasters and insurance policies, they naturally had a difficult
time understanding how a long collection of ones and zeroes could
constitute a salable product.
Obviously Microsoft prevailed over these objections, and so did
Apple. But the objections still exist. The most hackerish of all
the hackers, the Ur-hacker as it were, was and is Richard Stallman,
who became so annoyed with the evil practice of selling software
that, in 1984 (the same year that the Macintosh went on sale) he
went off and founded something called the Free Software Foundation,
which commenced work on something called GNU. Gnu is an acronym for
Gnu's Not Unix, but this is a joke in more ways than one, because
GNU most certainly IS Unix,. Because of trademark concerns ("Unix"
is trademarked by AT&T) they simply could not claim that it was
Unix, and so, just to be extra safe, they claimed that it wasn't.
Notwithstanding the incomparable talent and drive possessed by Mr.
Stallman and other GNU adherents, their project to build a free
Unix to compete against Microsoft and Apple's OSes was a little bit
like trying to dig a subway system with a teaspoon. Until, that is,
the advent of Linux, which I will get to later.
But the basic idea of re-creating an operating system from scratch
was perfectly sound and completely doable. It has been done many
times. It is inherent in the very nature of operating systems.
Operating systems are not strictly necessary. There is no reason
why a sufficiently dedicated coder could not start from nothing
with every project and write fresh code to handle such basic,
low-level operations as controlling the read/write heads on the
disk drives and lighting up pixels on the screen. The very first
computers had to be programmed in this way. But since nearly every
program needs to carry out those same basic operations, this
approach would lead to vast duplication of effort.
Nothing is more disagreeable to the hacker than duplication of
effort. The first and most important mental habit that people
develop when they learn how to write computer programs is to
generalize, generalize, generalize. To make their code as modular
and flexible as possible, breaking large problems down into small
subroutines that can be used over and over again in different
contexts. Consequently, the development of operating systems,
despite being technically unnecessary, was inevitable. Because at
its heart, an operating system is nothing more than a library
containing the most commonly used code, written once (and hopefully
written well) and then made available to every coder who needs it.
So a proprietary, closed, secret operating system is a
contradiction in terms. It goes against the whole point of having
an operating system. And it is impossible to keep them secret
anyway. The source code--the original lines of text written by the
programmers--can be kept secret. But an OS as a whole is a
collection of small subroutines that do very specific, very clearly
defined jobs. Exactly what those subroutines do has to be made
public, quite explicitly and exactly, or else the OS is completely
useless to programmers; they can't make use of those subroutines if
they don't have a complete and perfect understanding of what the
subroutines do.
The only thing that isn't made public is exactly how the
subroutines do what they do. But once you know what a subroutine
does, it's generally quite easy (if you are a hacker) to write one
of your own that does exactly the same thing. It might take a
while, and it is tedious and unrewarding, but in most cases it's
not really hard.
What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing; it's
deciding what to write. And the vendors of commercial OSes have
already decided, and published their decisions.
This has been generally understood for a long time. MS-DOS was
duplicated, functionally, by a rival product, written from scratch,
called ProDOS, that did all of the same things in pretty much the
same way. In other words, another company was able to write code
that did all of the same things as MS-DOS and sell it at a profit.
If you are using the Linux OS, you can get a free program called
WINE which is a windows emulator; that is, you can open up a window
on your desktop that runs windows programs. It means that a
completely functional Windows OS has been recreated inside of Unix,
like a ship in a bottle. And Unix itself, which is vastly more
sophisticated than MS-DOS, has been built up from scratch many
times over. Versions of it are sold by Sun, Hewlett-Packard, AT&T,
Silicon Graphics, IBM, and others.
People have, in other words, been re-writing basic OS code for so
long that all of the technology that constituted an "operating
system" in the traditional (pre-GUI) sense of that phrase is now so
cheap and common that it's literally free. Not only could Gates and
Allen not sell MS-DOS today, they could not even give it away,
because much more powerful OSes are already being given away. Even
the original Windows (which was the only windows until 1995) has
become worthless, in that there is no point in owning something
that can be emulated inside of Linux--which is, itself, free.
In this way the OS business is very different from, say, the car
business. Even an old rundown car has some value. You can use it
for making runs to the dump, or strip it for parts. It is the fate
of manufactured goods to slowly and gently depreciate as they get
old and have to compete against more modern products.
But it is the fate of operating systems to become free.
Microsoft is a great software applications company.
Applications--such as Microsoft Word--are an area where innovation
brings real, direct, tangible benefits to users. The innovations
might be new technology straight from the research department, or
they might be in the category of bells and whistles, but in any
event they are frequently useful and they seem to make users happy.
And Microsoft is in the process of becoming a great research
company. But Microsoft is not such a great operating systems
company. And this is not necessarily because their operating
systems are all that bad from a purely technological standpoint.
Microsoft's OSes do have their problems, sure, but they are vastly
better than they used to be, and they are adequate for most people.
Why, then, do I say that Microsoft is not such a great operating
systems company? Because the very nature of operating systems is
such that it is senseless for them to be developed and owned by a
specific company. It's a thankless job to begin with. Applications
create possibilities for millions of credulous users, whereas OSes
impose limitations on thousands of grumpy coders, and so OS-makers
will forever be on the shit-list of anyone who counts for anything
in the high-tech world. Applications get used by people whose big
problem is understanding all of their features, whereas OSes get
hacked by coders who are annoyed by their limitations. The OS
business has been good to Microsoft only insofar as it has given
them the money they needed to launch a really good applications
software business and to hire a lot of smart researchers. Now it
really ought to be jettisoned, like a spent booster stage from a
rocket. The big question is whether Microsoft is capable of doing
this. Or is it addicted to OS sales in the same way as Apple is to
selling hardware?
Keep in mind that Apple's ability to monopolize its own hardware
supply was once cited, by learned observers, as a great advantage
over Microsoft. At the time, it seemed to place them in a much
stronger position. In the end, it nearly killed them, and may kill
them yet. The problem, for Apple, was that most of the world's
computer users ended up owning cheaper hardware. But cheap hardware
couldn't run MacOS, and so these people switched to Windows.
Replace "hardware" with "operating systems," and "Apple" with
"Microsoft" and you can see the same thing about to happen all over
again. Microsoft dominates the OS market, which makes them money
and seems like a great idea for now. But cheaper and better OSes
are available, and they are growingly popular in parts of the world
that are not so saturated with computers as the US. Ten years from
now, most of the world's computer users may end up owning these
cheaper OSes. But these OSes do not, for the time being, run any
Microsoft applications, and so these people will use something
else.
To put it more directly: every time someone decides to use a
non-Microsoft OS, Microsoft's OS division, obviously, loses a
customer. But, as things stand now, Microsoft's applications
division loses a customer too. This is not such a big deal as long
as almost everyone uses Microsoft OSes. But as soon as Windows'
market share begins to slip, the math starts to look pretty dismal
for the people in Redmond.
This argument could be countered by saying that Microsoft could
simply re-compile its applications to run under other OSes. But
this strategy goes against most normal corporate instincts. Again
the case of Apple is instructive. When things started to go south
for Apple, they should have ported their OS to cheap PC hardware.
But they didn't. Instead, they tried to make the most of their
brilliant hardware, adding new features and expanding the product
line. But this only had the effect of making their OS more
dependent on these special hardware features, which made it worse
for them in the end.
Likewise, when Microsoft's position in the OS world is threatened,
their corporate instincts will tell them to pile more new features
into their operating systems, and then re-jigger their software
applications to exploit those special features. But this will only
have the effect of making their applications dependent on an OS
with declining market share, and make it worse for them in the end.
The operating system market is a death-trap, a tar-pit, a slough of
despond. There are only two reasons to invest in Apple and
Microsoft. (1) each of these companies is in what we would call a
co-dependency relationship with their customers. The customers Want
To Believe, and Apple and Microsoft know how to give them what they
want. (2) each company works very hard to add new features to their
OSes, which works to secure customer loyalty, at least for a little
while.
Accordingly, most of the remainder of this essay will be about
those two topics.
THE TECHNOSPHERE
Unix is the only OS remaining whose GUI (a vast suite of code
called the X Windows System) is separate from the OS in the old
sense of the phrase. This is to say that you can run Unix in pure
command-line mode if you want to, with no windows, icons, mouses,
etc. whatsoever, and it will still be Unix and capable of doing
everything Unix is supposed to do. But the other OSes: MacOS, the
Windows family, and BeOS, have their GUIs tangled up with the
old-fashioned OS functions to the extent that they have to run in
GUI mode, or else they are not really running. So it's no longer
really possible to think of GUIs as being distinct from the OS;
they're now an inextricable part of the OSes that they belong
to--and they are by far the largest part, and by far the most
expensive and difficult part to create.
There are only two ways to sell a product: price and features. When
OSes are free, OS companies cannot compete on price, and so they
compete on features. This means that they are always trying to
outdo each other writing code that, until recently, was not
considered to be part of an OS at all: stuff like GUIs. This
explains a lot about how these companies behave.
It explains why Microsoft added a browser to their OS, for example.
It is easy to get free browsers, just as to get free OSes. If
browsers are free, and OSes are free, it would seem that there is
no way to make money from browsers or OSes. But if you can
integrate a browser into the OS and thereby imbue both of them with
new features, you have a salable product.
Setting aside, for the moment, the fact that this makes government
anti-trust lawyers really mad, this strategy makes sense. At least,
it makes sense if you assume (as Microsoft's management appears to)
that the OS has to be protected at all costs. The real question is
whether every new technological trend that comes down the pike
ought to be used as a crutch to maintain the OS's dominant
position. Confronted with the Web phenomenon, Microsoft had to
develop a really good web browser, and they did. But then they had
a choice: they could have made that browser work on many different
OSes, which would give Microsoft a strong position in the Internet
world no matter what happened to their OS market share. Or they
could make the browser one with the OS, gambling that this would
make the OS look so modern and sexy that it would help to preserve
their dominance in that market. The problem is that when
Microsoft's OS position begins to erode (and since it is currently
at something like ninety percent, it can't go anywhere but down) it
will drag everything else down with it.
In your high school geology class you probably were taught that all
life on earth exists in a paper-thin shell called the biosphere,
which is trapped between thousands of miles of dead rock underfoot,
and cold dead radioactive empty space above. Companies that sell
OSes exist in a sort of technosphere. Underneath is technology that
has already become free. Above is technology that has yet to be
developed, or that is too crazy and speculative to be productized
just yet. Like the Earth's biosphere, the technosphere is very thin
compared to what is above and what is below.
But it moves a lot faster. In various parts of our world, it is
possible to go and visit rich fossil beds where skeleton lies piled
upon skeleton, recent ones on top and more ancient ones below. In
theory they go all the way back to the first single-celled
organisms. And if you use your imagination a bit, you can
understand that, if you hang around long enough, you'll become
fossilized there too, and in time some more advanced organism will
become fossilized on top of you.
The fossil record--the La Brea Tar Pit--of software technology is
the Internet. Anything that shows up there is free for the taking
(possibly illegal, but free). Executives at companies like
Microsoft must get used to the experience--unthinkable in other
industries--of throwing millions of dollars into the development of
new technologies, such as Web browsers, and then seeing the same or
equivalent software show up on the Internet two years, or a year,
or even just a few months, later.
By continuing to develop new technologies and add features onto
their products they can keep one step ahead of the fossilization
process, but on certain days they must feel like mammoths caught at
La Brea, using all their energies to pull their feet, over and over
again, out of the sucking hot tar that wants to cover and envelop
them.
Survival in this biosphere demands sharp tusks and heavy, stomping
feet at one end of the organization, and Microsoft famously has
those. But trampling the other mammoths into the tar can only keep
you alive for so long. The danger is that in their obsession with
staying out of the fossil beds, these companies will forget about
what lies above the biosphere: the realm of new technology. In
other words, they must hang onto their primitive weapons and crude
competitive instincts, but also evolve powerful brains. This
appears to be what Microsoft is doing with its research division,
which has been hiring smart people right and left (Here I should
mention that although I know, and socialize with, several people in
that company's research division, we never talk about business
issues and I have little to no idea what the hell they are up to. I
have learned much more about Microsoft by using the Linux operating
system than I ever would have done by using Windows).
Never mind how Microsoft used to make money; today, it is making
its money on a kind of temporal arbitrage. "Arbitrage," in the
usual sense, means to make money by taking advantage of differences
in the price of something between different markets. It is spatial,
in other words, and hinges on the arbitrageur knowing what is going
on simultaneously in different places. Microsoft is making money by
taking advantage of differences in the price of technology in
different times. Temporal arbitrage, if I may coin a phrase, hinges
on the arbitrageur knowing what technologies people will pay money
for next year, and how soon afterwards those same technologies will
become free. What spatial and temporal arbitrage have in common is
that both hinge on the arbitrageur's being extremely well-informed;
one about price gradients across space at a given time, and the
other about price gradients over time in a given place.
So Apple/Microsoft shower new features upon their users almost
daily, in the hopes that a steady stream of genuine technical
innovations, combined with the "I want to believe" phenomenon, will
prevent their customers from looking across the road towards the
cheaper and better OSes that are available to them. The question is
whether this makes sense in the long run. If Microsoft is addicted
to OSes as Apple is to hardware, then they will bet the whole farm
on their OSes, and tie all of their new applications and
technologies to them. Their continued survival will then depend on
these two things: adding more features to their OSes so that
customers will not switch to the cheaper alternatives, and
maintaining the image that, in some mysterious way, gives those
customers the feeling that they are getting something for their
money.
The latter is a truly strange and interesting cultural phenomenon.
THE INTERFACE CULTURE
A few years ago I walked into a grocery store somewhere and was
presented with the following tableau vivant: near the entrance a
young couple were standing in front of a large cosmetics display.
The man was stolidly holding a shopping basket between his hands
while his mate raked blister-packs of makeup off the display and
piled them in. Since then I've always thought of that man as the
personification of an interesting human tendency: not only are we
not offended to be dazzled by manufactured images, but we like it.
We practically insist on it. We are eager to be complicit in our
own dazzlement: to pay money for a theme park ride, vote for a guy
who's obviously lying to us, or stand there holding the basket as
it's filled up with cosmetics.
I was in Disney World recently, specifically the part of it called
the Magic Kingdom, walking up Main Street USA. This is a perfect
gingerbready Victorian small town that culminates in a Disney
castle. It was very crowded; we shuffled rather than walked.
Directly in front of me was a man with a camcorder. It was one of
the new breed of camcorders where instead of peering through a
viewfinder you gaze at a flat-panel color screen about the size of
a playing card, which televises live coverage of whatever the
camcorder is seeing. He was holding the appliance close to his
face, so that it obstructed his view. Rather than go see a real
small town for free, he had paid money to see a pretend one, and
rather than see it with the naked eye he was watching it on
television.
And rather than stay home and read a book, I was watching him.
Americans' preference for mediated experiences is obvious enough,
and I'm not going to keep pounding it into the ground. I'm not even
going to make snotty comments about it--after all, I was at Disney
World as a paying customer. But it clearly relates to the colossal
success of GUIs and so I have to talk about it some. Disney does
mediated experiences better than anyone. If they understood what
OSes are, and why people use them, they could crush Microsoft in a
year or two.
In the part of Disney World called the Animal Kingdom there is a
new attraction, slated to open in March 1999, called the Maharajah
Jungle Trek. It was open for sneak previews when I was there. This
is a complete stone-by-stone reproduction of a hypothetical ruin in
the jungles of India. According to its backstory, it was built by a
local rajah in the 16th Century as a game reserve. He would go
there with his princely guests to hunt Bengal tigers. As time went
on it fell into disrepair and the tigers and monkeys took it over;
eventually, around the time of India's independence, it became a
government wildlife reserve, now open to visitors.
The place looks more like what I have just described than any
actual building you might find in India. All the stones in the
broken walls are weathered as if monsoon rains had been trickling
down them for centuries, the paint on the gorgeous murals is flaked
and faded just so, and Bengal tigers loll amid stumps of broken
columns. Where modern repairs have been made to the ancient
structure, they've been done, not as Disney's engineers would do
them, but as thrifty Indian janitors would--with hunks of bamboo
and rust-spotted hunks of rebar. The rust is painted on, or course,
and protected from real rust by a plastic clear-coat, but you can't
tell unless you get down on your knees.
In one place you walk along a stone wall with a series of old
pitted friezes carved into it. One end of the wall has broken off
and settled into the earth, perhaps because of some long-forgotten
earthquake, and so a broad jagged crack runs across a panel or two,
but the story is still readable: first, primordial chaos leads to a
flourishing of many animal species. Next, we see the Tree of Life
surrounded by diverse animals. This is an obvious allusion (or, in
showbiz lingo, a tie-in) to the gigantic Tree of Life that
dominates the center of Disney's Animal Kingdom just as the Castle
dominates the Magic Kingdom or the Sphere does Epcot. But it's
rendered in historically correct style and could probably fool
anyone who didn't have a Ph.D. in Indian art history.
The next panel shows a mustachioed H. sapiens chopping down the
Tree of Life with a scimitar, and the animals fleeing every which
way. The one after that shows the misguided human getting walloped
by a tidal wave, part of a latter-day Deluge presumably brought on
by his stupidity.
The final panel, then, portrays the Sapling of Life beginning to
grow back, but now Man has ditched the edged weapon and joined the
other animals in standing around to adore and praise it.
It is, in other words, a prophecy of the Bottleneck: the scenario,
commonly espoused among modern-day environmentalists, that the
world faces an upcoming period of grave ecological tribulations
that will last for a few decades or centuries and end when we find
a new harmonious modus vivendi with Nature.
Taken as a whole the frieze is a pretty brilliant piece of work.
Obviously it's not an ancient Indian ruin, and some person or
people now living deserve credit for it. But there are no
signatures on the Maharajah's game reserve at Disney World. There
are no signatures on anything, because it would ruin the whole
effect to have long strings of production credits dangling from
every custom-worn brick, as they do from Hollywood movies.
Among Hollywood writers, Disney has the reputation of being a real
wicked stepmother. It's not hard to see why. Disney is in the
business of putting out a product of seamless illusion--a magic
mirror that reflects the world back better than it really is. But a
writer is literally talking to his or her readers, not just
creating an ambience or presenting them with something to look at;
and just as the command-line interface opens a much more direct and
explicit channel from user to machine than the GUI, so it is with
words, writer, and reader.
The word, in the end, is the only system of encoding thoughts--the
only medium--that is not fungible, that refuses to dissolve in the
devouring torrent of electronic media (the richer tourists at
Disney World wear t-shirts printed with the names of famous
designers, because designs themselves can be bootlegged easily and
with impunity. The only way to make clothing that cannot be legally
bootlegged is to print copyrighted and trademarked words on it;
once you have taken that step, the clothing itself doesn't really
matter, and so a t-shirt is as good as anything else. T-shirts with
expensive words on them are now the insignia of the upper class.
T-shirts with cheap words, or no words at all, are for the
commoners).
But this special quality of words and of written communication
would have the same effect on Disney's product as spray-painted
graffiti on a magic mirror. So Disney does most of its
communication without resorting to words, and for the most part,
the words aren't missed. Some of Disney's older properties, such as
Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, and Alice in Wonderland, came out of
books. But the authors' names are rarely if ever mentioned, and you
can't buy the original books at the Disney store. If you could,
they would all seem old and queer, like very bad knockoffs of the
purer, more authentic Disney versions. Compared to more recent
productions like Beauty and the Beast and Mulan, the Disney movies
based on these books (particularly Alice in Wonderland and Peter
Pan) seem deeply bizarre, and not wholly appropriate for children.
That stands to reason, because Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie were
very strange men, and such is the nature of the written word that
their personal strangeness shines straight through all the layers
of Disneyfication like x-rays through a wall. Probably for this
very reason, Disney seems to have stopped buying books altogether,
and now finds its themes and characters in folk tales, which have
the lapidary, time-worn quality of the ancient bricks in the
Maharajah's ruins.
If I can risk a broad generalization, most of the people who go to
Disney World have zero interest in absorbing new ideas from books.
Which sounds snide, but listen: they have no qualms about being
presented with ideas in other forms. Disney World is stuffed with
environmental messages now, and the guides at Animal Kingdom can
talk your ear off about biology.
If you followed those tourists home, you might find art, but it
would be the sort of unsigned folk art that's for sale in Disney
World's African- and Asian-themed stores. In general they only seem
comfortable with media that have been ratified by great age,
massive popular acceptance, or both.
In this world, artists are like the anonymous, illiterate stone
carvers who built the great cathedrals of Europe and then faded
away into unmarked graves in the churchyard. The cathedral as a
whole is awesome and stirring in spite, and possibly because, of
the fact that we have no idea who built it. When we walk through it
we are communing not with individual stone carvers but with an
entire culture.
Disney World works the same way. If you are an intellectual type, a
reader or writer of books, the nicest thing you can say about this
is that the execution is superb. But it's easy to find the whole
environment a little creepy, because something is missing: the
translation of all its content into clear explicit written words,
the attribution of the ideas to specific people. You can't argue
with it. It seems as if a hell of a lot might be being glossed
over, as if Disney World might be putting one over on us, and
possibly getting away with all kinds of buried assumptions and
muddled thinking.
But this is precisely the same as what is lost in the transition
from the command-line interface to the GUI.
Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business:
short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with
expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface
unto itself--and more than just graphical. Let's call it a
Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world,
real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.
Why are we rejecting explicit word-based interfaces, and embracing
graphical or sensorial ones--a trend that accounts for the success
of both Microsoft and Disney?
Part of it is simply that the world is very complicated now--much
more complicated than the hunter-gatherer world that our brains
evolved to cope with--and we simply can't handle all of the
details. We have to delegate. We have no choice but to trust some
nameless artist at Disney or programmer at Apple or Microsoft to
make a few choices for us, close off some options, and give us a
conveniently packaged executive summary.
But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this
century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places
like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their
grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the
intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and
turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used
to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.
We Americans are the only ones who didn't get creamed at some point
during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have
inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular
set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it
right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with
anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading
books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more
comfortable with propagating those values to future generations
nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media.
Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many
lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on
having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in
American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in
a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become
outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages,
may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human
rights than the Declaration of Independence.
A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core
values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an
obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable
medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for
extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran,
and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed by our media
are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can
wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of crap into
people's minds.
Orlando used to have a military installation called McCoy Air Force
Base, with long runways from which B-52s could take off and reach
Cuba, or just about anywhere else, with loads of nukes. But now
McCoy has been scrapped and repurposed. It has been absorbed into
Orlando's civilian airport. The long runways are being used to land
747-loads of tourists from Brazil, Italy, Russia and Japan, so that
they can come to Disney World and steep in our media for a while.
To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam,
this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. It is
obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our
arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts
that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global
trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of
multiculturalism (or "honoring diversity" or whatever you want to
call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop
asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right
and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and
another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set
of qualities.
The lesson most people are taking home from the Twentieth Century
is that, in order for a large number of different cultures to
coexist peacefully on the globe (or even in a neighborhood) it is
necessary for people to suspend judgment in this way. Hence (I
would argue) our suspicion of, and hostility towards, all authority
figures in modern culture. As David Foster Wallace has explained in
his essay "E Unibus Pluram," this is the fundamental message of
television; it is the message that people take home, anyway, after
they have steeped in our media long enough. It's not expressed in
these highfalutin terms, of course. It comes through as the
presumption that all authority figures--teachers, generals, cops,
ministers, politicians--are hypocritical buffoons, and that hip
jaded coolness is the only way to be.
The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to
make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there's
no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame.
The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire it
point of having a culture. I think this is why guys with machine
guns sometimes pop up in places like Luxor, and begin pumping
bullets into Westerners. They perfectly understand the lesson of
McCoy Air Force Base. When their sons come home wearing Chicago
Bulls caps with the bills turned sideways, the dads go out of their
minds.
The global anti-culture that has been conveyed into every cranny of
the world by television is a culture unto itself, and by the
standards of great and ancient cultures like Islam and France, it
seems grossly inferior, at least at first. The only good thing you
can say about it is that it makes world wars and Holocausts less
likely--and that is actually a pretty good thing!
The only real problem is that anyone who has no culture, other than
this global monoculture, is completely screwed. Anyone who grows up
watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an
atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching
bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where
postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional
notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world
as one pretty feckless human being. And--again--perhaps the goal of
all this is to make us feckless so we won't nuke each other.
On the other hand, if you are raised within some specific culture,
you end up with a basic set of tools that you can use to think
about and understand the world. You might use those tools to reject
the culture you were raised in, but at least you've got some tools.
In this country, the people who run things--who populate major law
firms and corporate boards--understand all of this at some level.
They pay lip service to multiculturalism and diversity and
non-judgmentalness, but they don't raise their own children that
way. I have highly educated, technically sophisticated friends who
have moved to small towns in Iowa to live and raise their children,
and there are Hasidic Jewish enclaves in New York where large
numbers of kids are being brought up according to traditional
beliefs. Any suburban community might be thought of as a place
where people who hold certain (mostly implicit) beliefs go to live
among others who think the same way.
And not only do these people feel some responsibility to their own
children, but to the country as a whole. Some of the upper class
are vile and cynical, of course, but many spend at least part of
their time fretting about what direction the country is going in,
and what responsibilities they have. And so issues that are
important to book-reading intellectuals, such as global
environmental collapse, eventually percolate through the porous
buffer of mass culture and show up as ancient Hindu ruins in
Orlando.
You may be asking: what the hell does all this have to do with
operating systems? As I've explained, there is no way to explain
the domination of the OS market by Apple/Microsoft without looking
to cultural explanations, and so I can't get anywhere, in this
essay, without first letting you know where I'm coming from
vis-a-vis contemporary culture.
Contemporary culture is a two-tiered system, like the Morlocks and
the Eloi in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, except that it's been
turned upside down. In The Time Machine the Eloi were an effete
upper class, supported by lots of subterranean Morlocks who kept
the technological wheels turning. But in our world it's the other
way round. The Morlocks are in the minority, and they are running
the show, because they understand how everything works. The much
more numerous Eloi learn everything they know from being steeped
from birth in electronic media directed and controlled by
book-reading Morlocks. So many ignorant people could be dangerous
if they got pointed in the wrong direction, and so we've evolved a
popular culture that is (a) almost unbelievably infectious and (b)
neuters every person who gets infected by it, by rendering them
unwilling to make judgments and incapable of taking stands.
Morlocks, who have the energy and intelligence to comprehend
details, go out and master complex subjects and produce Disney-like
Sensorial Interfaces so that Eloi can get the gist without having
to strain their minds or endure boredom. Those Morlocks will go to
India and tediously explore a hundred ruins, then come home and
built sanitary bug-free versions: highlight films, as it were. This
costs a lot, because Morlocks insist on good coffee and first-class
airline tickets, but that's no problem because Eloi like to be
dazzled and will gladly pay for it all.
Now I realize that most of this probably sounds snide and bitter to
the point of absurdity: your basic snotty intellectual throwing a
tantrum about those unlettered philistines. As if I were a
self-styled Moses, coming down from the mountain all alone,
carrying the stone tablets bearing the Ten Commandments carved in
immutable stone--the original command-line interface--and blowing
his stack at the weak, unenlightened Hebrews worshipping images.
Not only that, but it sounds like I'm pumping some sort of
conspiracy theory.
But that is not where I'm going with this. The situation I
describe, here, could be bad, but doesn't have to be bad and isn't
necessarily bad now:
* It simply is the case that we are way too busy, nowadays, to
comprehend everything in detail. And it's better to comprehend it
dimly, through an interface, than not at all. Better for ten
million Eloi to go on the Kilimanjaro Safari at Disney World than
for a thousand cardiovascular surgeons and mutual fund managers to
go on "real" ones in Kenya.
* The boundary between these two classes is more porous than I've
made it sound. I'm always running into regular dudes--construction
workers, auto mechanics, taxi drivers, galoots in general--who
were largely aliterate until something made it necessary for them
to become readers and start actually thinking about things.
Perhaps they had to come to grips with alcoholism, perhaps they
got sent to jail, or came down with a disease, or suffered a
crisis in religious faith, or simply got bored. Such people can
get up to speed on particular subjects quite rapidly. Sometimes
their lack of a broad education makes them over-apt to go off on
intellectual wild goose chases, but, hey, at least a wild goose
chase gives you some exercise.
* The spectre of a polity controlled by the fads and whims of voters
who actually believe that there are significant differences
between Bud Lite and Miller Lite, and who think that professional
wrestling is for real, is naturally alarming to people who don't.
But then countries controlled via the command-line interface, as
it were, by double-domed intellectuals, be they religious or
secular, are generally miserable places to live.
* Sophisticated people deride Disneyesque entertainments as pat and
saccharine, but, hey, if the result of that is to instill
basically warm and sympathetic reflexes, at a preverbal level,
into hundreds of millions of unlettered media-steepers, then how
bad can it be? We killed a lobster in our kitchen last night and
my daughter cried for an hour. The Japanese, who used to be just
about the fiercest people on earth, have become infatuated with
cuddly adorable cartoon characters.
* My own family--the people I know best--is divided about evenly
between people who will probably read this essay and people who
almost certainly won't, and I can't say for sure that one group is
necessarily warmer, happier, or better-adjusted than the other.
MORLOCKS AND ELOI AT THE KEYBOARD
Back in the days of the command-line interface, users were all
Morlocks who had to convert their thoughts into alphanumeric
symbols and type them in, a grindingly tedious process that
stripped away all ambiguity, laid bare all hidden assumptions, and
cruelly punished laziness and imprecision. Then the
interface-makers went to work on their GUIs, and introduced a new
semiotic layer between people and machines. People who use such
systems have abdicated the responsibility, and surrendered the
power, of sending bits directly to the chip that's doing the
arithmetic, and handed that responsibility and power over to the
OS. This is tempting because giving clear instructions, to anyone
or anything, is difficult. We cannot do it without thinking, and
depending on the complexity of the situation, we may have to think
hard about abstract things, and consider any number of
ramifications, in order to do a good job of it. For most of us,
this is hard work. We want things to be easier. How badly we want
it can be measured by the size of Bill Gates's fortune.
The OS has (therefore) become a sort of intellectual labor-saving
device that tries to translate humans' vaguely expressed intentions
into bits. In effect we are asking our computers to shoulder
responsibilities that have always been considered the province of
human beings--we want them to understand our desires, to anticipate
our needs, to foresee consequences, to make connections, to handle
routine chores without being asked, to remind us of what we ought
to be reminded of while filtering out noise.
At the upper (which is to say, closer to the user) levels, this is
done through a set of conventions--menus, buttons, and so on. These
work in the sense that analogies work: they help Eloi understand
abstract or unfamiliar concepts by likening them to something
known. But the loftier word "metaphor" is used.
The overarching concept of the MacOS was the "desktop metaphor" and
it subsumed any number of lesser (and frequently conflicting, or at
least mixed) metaphors. Under a GUI, a file (frequently called
"document") is metaphrased as a window on the screen (which is
called a "desktop"). The window is almost always too small to
contain the document and so you "move around," or, more
pretentiously, "navigate" in the document by "clicking and
dragging" the "thumb" on the "scroll bar." When you "type" (using a
keyboard) or "draw" (using a "mouse") into the "window" or use
pull-down "menus" and "dialog boxes" to manipulate its contents,
the results of your labors get stored (at least in theory) in a
"file," and later you can pull the same information back up into
another "window." When you don't want it anymore, you "drag" it
into the "trash."
There is massively promiscuous metaphor-mixing going on here, and I
could deconstruct it 'til the cows come home, but I won't. Consider
only one word: "document." When we document something in the real
world, we make fixed, permanent, immutable records of it. But
computer documents are volatile, ephemeral constellations of data.
Sometimes (as when you've just opened or saved them) the document
as portrayed in the window is identical to what is stored, under
the same name, in a file on the disk, but other times (as when you
have made changes without saving them) it is completely different.
In any case, every time you hit "Save" you annihilate the previous
version of the "document" and replace it with whatever happens to
be in the window at the moment. So even the word "save" is being
used in a sense that is grotesquely misleading---"destroy one
version, save another" would be more accurate.
Anyone who uses a word processor for very long inevitably has the
experience of putting hours of work into a long document and then
losing it because the computer crashes or the power goes out. Until
the moment that it disappears from the screen, the document seems
every bit as solid and real as if it had been typed out in ink on
paper. But in the next moment, without warning, it is completely
and irretrievably gone, as if it had never existed. The user is
left with a feeling of disorientation (to say nothing of annoyance)
stemming from a kind of metaphor shear--you realize that you've
been living and thinking inside of a metaphor that is essentially
bogus.
So GUIs use metaphors to make computing easier, but they are bad
metaphors. Learning to use them is essentially a word game, a
process of learning new definitions of words like "window" and
"document" and "save" that are different from, and in many cases
almost diametrically opposed to, the old. Somewhat improbably, this
has worked very well, at least from a commercial standpoint, which
is to say that Apple/Microsoft have made a lot of money off of it.
All of the other modern operating systems have learned that in
order to be accepted by users they must conceal their underlying
gutwork beneath the same sort of spackle. This has some advantages:
if you know how to use one GUI operating system, you can probably
work out how to use any other in a few minutes. Everything works a
little differently, like European plumbing--but with some fiddling
around, you can type a memo or surf the web.
Most people who shop for OSes (if they bother to shop at all) are
comparing not the underlying functions but the superficial look and
feel. The average buyer of an OS is not really paying for, and is
not especially interested in, the low-level code that allocates
memory or writes bytes onto the disk. What we're really buying is a
system of metaphors. And--much more important--what we're buying
into is the underlying assumption that metaphors are a good way to
deal with the world.
Recently a lot of new hardware has become available that gives
computers numerous interesting ways of affecting the real world:
making paper spew out of printers, causing words to appear on
screens thousands of miles away, shooting beams of radiation
through cancer patients, creating realistic moving pictures of the
Titanic. Windows is now used as an OS for cash registers and bank
tellers' terminals. My satellite TV system uses a sort of GUI to
change channels and show program guides. Modern cellular telephones
have a crude GUI built into a tiny LCD screen. Even Legos now have
a GUI: you can buy a Lego set called Mindstorms that enables you to
build little Lego robots and program them through a GUI on your
computer.
So we are now asking the GUI to do a lot more than serve as a
glorified typewriter. Now we want to become a generalized tool for
dealing with reality. This has become a bonanza for companies that
make a living out of bringing new technology to the mass market.
Obviously you cannot sell a complicated technological system to
people without some sort of interface that enables them to use it.
The internal combustion engine was a technological marvel in its
day, but useless as a consumer good until a clutch, transmission,
steering wheel and throttle were connected to it. That odd
collection of gizmos, which survives to this day in every car on
the road, made up what we would today call a user interface. But if
cars had been invented after Macintoshes, carmakers would not have
bothered to gin up all of these arcane devices. We would have a
computer screen instead of a dashboard, and a mouse (or at best a
joystick) instead of a steering wheel, and we'd shift gears by
pulling down a menu:
PARK
---
REVERSE
---
NEUTRAL
----
3
2
1
---
Help...
A few lines of computer code can thus be made to substitute for any
imaginable mechanical interface. The problem is that in many cases
the substitute is a poor one. Driving a car through a GUI would be
a miserable experience. Even if the GUI were perfectly bug-free, it
would be incredibly dangerous, because menus and buttons simply
can't be as responsive as direct mechanical controls. My friend's
dad, the gentleman who was restoring the MGB, never would have
bothered with it if it had been equipped with a GUI. It wouldn't
have been any fun.
The steering wheel and gearshift lever were invented during an era
when the most complicated technology in most homes was a butter
churn. Those early carmakers were simply lucky, in that they could
dream up whatever interface was best suited to the task of driving
an automobile, and people would learn it. Likewise with the dial
telephone and the AM radio. By the time of the Second World War,
most people knew several interfaces: they could not only churn
butter but also drive a car, dial a telephone, turn on a radio,
summon flame from a cigarette lighter, and change a light bulb.
But now every little thing--wristwatches, VCRs, stoves--is jammed
with features, and every feature is useless without an interface.
If you are like me, and like most other consumers, you have never
used ninety percent of the available features on your microwave
oven, VCR, or cellphone. You don't even know that these features
exist. The small benefit they might bring you is outweighed by the
sheer hassle of having to learn about them. This has got to be a
big problem for makers of consumer goods, because they can't
compete without offering features.
It's no longer acceptable for engineers to invent a wholly novel
user interface for every new product, as they did in the case of
the automobile, partly because it's too expensive and partly
because ordinary people can only learn so much. If the VCR had been
invented a hundred years ago, it would have come with a thumbwheel
to adjust the tracking and a gearshift to change between forward
and reverse and a big cast-iron handle to load or to eject the
cassettes. It would have had a big analog clock on the front of it,
and you would have set the time by moving the hands around on the
dial. But because the VCR was invented when it was--during a sort
of awkward transitional period between the era of mechanical
interfaces and GUIs--it just had a bunch of pushbuttons on the
front, and in order to set the time you had to push the buttons in
just the right way. This must have seemed reasonable enough to the
engineers responsible for it, but to many users it was simply
impossible. Thus the famous blinking 12:00 that appears on so many
VCRs. Computer people call this "the blinking twelve problem". When
they talk about it, though, they usually aren't talking about VCRs.
Modern VCRs usually have some kind of on-screen programming, which
means that you can set the time and control other features through
a sort of primitive GUI. GUIs have virtual pushbuttons too, of
course, but they also have other types of virtual controls, like
radio buttons, checkboxes, text entry boxes, dials, and scrollbars.
Interfaces made out of these components seem to be a lot easier,
for many people, than pushing those little buttons on the front of
the machine, and so the blinking 12:00 itself is slowly
disappearing from America's living rooms. The blinking twelve
problem has moved on to plague other technologies.
So the GUI has gone beyond being an interface to personal
computers, and become a sort of meta-interface that is pressed into
service for every new piece of consumer technology. It is rarely an
ideal fit, but having an ideal, or even a good interface is no
longer the priority; the important thing now is having some kind of
interface that customers will actually use, so that manufacturers
can claim, with a straight face, that they are offering new
features.
We want GUIs largely because they are convenient and because they
are easy-- or at least the GUI makes it seem that way Of course,
nothing is really easy and simple, and putting a nice interface on
top of it does not change that fact. A car controlled through a GUI
would be easier to drive than one controlled through pedals and
steering wheel, but it would be incredibly dangerous.
By using GUIs all the time we have insensibly bought into a premise
that few people would have accepted if it were presented to them
bluntly: namely, that hard things can be made easy, and complicated
things simple, by putting the right interface on them. In order to
understand how bizarre this is, imagine that book reviews were
written according to the same values system that we apply to user
interfaces: "The writing in this book is marvelously simple-minded
and glib; the author glosses over complicated subjects and employs
facile generalizations in almost every sentence. Readers rarely
have to think, and are spared all of the difficulty and tedium
typically involved in reading old-fashioned books." As long as we
stick to simple operations like setting the clocks on our VCRs,
this is not so bad. But as we try to do more ambitious things with
our technologies, we inevitably run into the problem of:
METAPHOR SHEAR
I began using Microsoft Word as soon as the first version was
released around 1985. After some initial hassles I found it to be a
better tool than MacWrite, which was its only competition at the
time. I wrote a lot of stuff in early versions of Word, storing it
all on floppies, and transferred the contents of all my floppies to
my first hard drive, which I acquired around 1987. As new versions
of Word came out I faithfully upgraded, reasoning that as a writer
it made sense for me to spend a certain amount of money on tools.
Sometime in the mid-1980's I attempted to open one of my old,
circa-1985 Word documents using the version of Word then current:
6.0 It didn't work. Word 6.0 did not recognize a document created
by an earlier version of itself. By opening it as a text file, I
was able to recover the sequences of letters that made up the text
of the document. My words were still there. But the formatting had
been run through a log chipper--the words I'd written were
interrupted by spates of empty rectangular boxes and gibberish.
Now, in the context of a business (the chief market for Word) this
sort of thing is only an annoyance--one of the routine hassles that
go along with using computers. It's easy to buy little file
converter programs that will take care of this problem. But if you
are a writer whose career is words, whose professional identity is
a corpus of written documents, this kind of thing is extremely
disquieting. There are very few fixed assumptions in my line of
work, but one of them is that once you have written a word, it is
written, and cannot be unwritten. The ink stains the paper, the
chisel cuts the stone, the stylus marks the clay, and something has
irrevocably happened (my brother-in-law is a theologian who reads
3250-year-old cuneiform tablets--he can recognize the handwriting
of particular scribes, and identify them by name). But
word-processing software--particularly the sort that employs
special, complex file formats--has the eldritch power to unwrite
things. A small change in file formats, or a few twiddled bits, and
months' or years' literary output can cease to exist.
Now this was technically a fault in the application (Word 6.0 for
the Macintosh) not the operating system (MacOS 7 point something)
and so the initial target of my annoyance was the people who were
responsible for Word. But. On the other hand, I could have chosen
the "save as text" option in Word and saved all of my documents as
simple telegrams, and this problem would not have arisen. Instead I
had allowed myself to be seduced by all of those flashy formatting
options that hadn't even existed until GUIs had come along to make
them practicable. I had gotten into the habit of using them to make
my documents look pretty (perhaps prettier than they deserved to
look; all of the old documents on those floppies turned out to be
more or less crap). Now I was paying the price for that
self-indulgence. Technology had moved on and found ways to make my
documents look even prettier, and the consequence of it was that
all old ugly documents had ceased to exist.
It was--if you'll pardon me for a moment's strange little
fantasy--as if I'd gone to stay at some resort, some exquisitely
designed and art-directed hotel, placing myself in the hands of
past masters of the Sensorial Interface, and had sat down in my
room and written a story in ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad,
and when I returned from dinner, discovered that the maid had taken
my work away and left behind in its place a quill pen and a stack
of fine parchment--explaining that the room looked ever so much
finer this way, and it was all part of a routine upgrade. But
written on these sheets of paper, in flawless penmanship, were long
sequences of words chosen at random from the dictionary. Appalling,
sure, but I couldn't really lodge a complaint with the management,
because by staying at this resort I had given my consent to it. I
had surrendered my Morlock credentials and become an Eloi.
LINUX
During the late 1980's and early 1990's I spent a lot of time
programming Macintoshes, and eventually decided for fork over
several hundred dollars for an Apple product called the Macintosh
Programmer's Workshop, or MPW. MPW had competitors, but it was
unquestionably the premier software development system for the Mac.
It was what Apple's own engineers used to write Macintosh code.
Given that MacOS was far more technologically advanced, at the
time, than its competition, and that Linux did not even exist yet,
and given that this was the actual program used by Apple's
world-class team of creative engineers, I had high expectations. It
arrived on a stack of floppy disks about a foot high, and so there
was plenty of time for my excitement to build during the endless
installation process. The first time I launched MPW, I was probably
expecting some kind of touch-feely multimedia showcase. Instead it
was austere, almost to the point of being intimidating. It was a
scrolling window into which you could type simple, unformatted
text. The system would then interpret these lines of text as
commands, and try to execute them.
It was, in other words, a glass teletype running a command line
interface. It came with all sorts of cryptic but powerful commands,
which could be invoked by typing their names, and which I learned
to use only gradually. It was not until a few years later, when I
began messing around with Unix, that I understood that the command
line interface embodied in MPW was a re-creation of Unix.
In other words, the first thing that Apple's hackers had done when
they'd got the MacOS up and running--probably even before they'd
gotten it up and running--was to re-create the Unix interface, so
that they would be able to get some useful work done. At the time,
I simply couldn't get my mind around this, but: as far as Apple's
hackers were concerned, the Mac's vaunted Graphical User Interface
was an impediment, something to be circumvented before the little
toaster even came out onto the market.
Even before my Powerbook crashed and obliterated my big file in
July 1995, there had been danger signs. An old college buddy of
mine, who starts and runs high-tech companies in Boston, had
developed a commercial product using Macintoshes as the front end.
Basically the Macs were high-performance graphics terminals, chosen
for their sweet user interface, giving users access to a large
database of graphical information stored on a network of much more
powerful, but less user-friendly, computers. This fellow was the
second person who turned me on to Macintoshes, by the way, and
through the mid-1980's we had shared the thrill of being high-tech
cognoscenti, using superior Apple technology in a world of
DOS-using knuckleheads. Early versions of my friend's system had
worked well, he told me, but when several machines joined the
network, mysterious crashes began to occur; sometimes the whole
network would just freeze. It was one of those bugs that could not
be reproduced easily. Finally they figured out that these network
crashes were triggered whenever a user, scanning the menus for a
particular item, held down the mouse button for more than a couple
of seconds.
Fundamentally, the MacOS could only do one thing at a time. Drawing
a menu on the screen is one thing. So when a menu was pulled down,
the Macintosh was not capable of doing anything else until that
indecisive user released the button.
This is not such a bad thing in a single-user, single-process
machine (although it's a fairly bad thing), but it's no good in a
machine that is on a network, because being on a network implies
some kind of continual low-level interaction with other machines.
By failing to respond to the network, the Mac caused a network-wide
crash.
In order to work with other computers, and with networks, and with
various different types of hardware, an OS must be incomparably
more complicated and powerful than either MS-DOS or the original
MacOS. The only way of connecting to the Internet that's worth
taking seriously is PPP, the Point-to-Point Protocol, which (never
mind the details) makes your computer--temporarily--a full-fledged
member of the Global Internet, with its own unique address, and
various privileges, powers, and responsibilities appertaining
thereunto. Technically it means your machine is running the TCP/IP
protocol, which, to make a long story short, revolves around
sending packets of data back and forth, in no particular order, and
at unpredictable times, according to a clever and elegant set of
rules. But sending a packet of data is one thing, and so an OS that
can only do one thing at a time cannot simultaneously be part of
the Internet and do anything else. When TCP/IP was invented,
running it was an honor reserved for Serious Computers--mainframes
and high-powered minicomputers used in technical and commercial
settings--and so the protocol is engineered around the assumption
that every computer using it is a serious machine, capable of doing
many things at once. Not to put too fine a point on it, a Unix
machine. Neither MacOS nor MS-DOS was originally built with that in
mind, and so when the Internet got hot, radical changes had to be
made.
When my Powerbook broke my heart, and when Word stopped recognizing
my old files, I jumped to Unix. The obvious alternative to MacOS
would have been Windows. I didn't really have anything against
Microsoft, or Windows. But it was pretty obvious, now, that old PC
operating systems were overreaching, and showing the strain, and,
perhaps, were best avoided until they had learned to walk and chew
gum at the same time.
The changeover took place on a particular day in the summer of
1995. I had been San Francisco for a couple of weeks, using my
PowerBook to work on a document. The document was too big to fit
onto a single floppy, and so I hadn't made a backup since leaving
home. The PowerBook crashed and wiped out the entire file.
It happened just as I was on my way out the door to visit a company
called Electric Communities, which in those days was in Los Altos.
I took my PowerBook with me. My friends at Electric Communities
were Mac users who had all sorts of utility software for unerasing
files and recovering from disk crashes, and I was certain I could
get most of the file back.
As it turned out, two different Mac crash recovery utilities were
unable to find any trace that my file had ever existed. It was
completely and systematically wiped out. We went through that hard
disk block by block and found disjointed fragments of countless
old, discarded, forgotten files, but none of what I wanted. The
metaphor shear was especially brutal that day. It was sort of like
watching the girl you've been in love with for ten years get killed
in a car wreck, and then attending her autopsy, and learning that
underneath the clothes and makeup she was just flesh and blood.
I must have been reeling around the offices of Electric Communities
in some kind of primal Jungian fugue, because at this moment three
weirdly synchronistic things happened.
(1) Randy Farmer, a co-founder of the company, came in for a quick
visit along with his family--he was recovering from back surgery at
the time. He had some hot gossip: "Windows 95 mastered today." What
this meant was that Microsoft's new operating system had, on this
day, been placed on a special compact disk known as a golden
master, which would be used to stamp out a jintillion copies in
preparation for its thunderous release a few weeks later. This news
was received peevishly by the staff of Electric Communities,
including one whose office door was plastered with the usual
assortment of cartoons and novelties, e.g.
(2) a copy of a Dilbert cartoon in which Dilbert, the
long-suffering corporate software engineer, encounters a portly,
bearded, hairy man of a certain age--a bit like Santa Claus, but
darker, with a certain edge about him. Dilbert recognizes this man,
based upon his appearance and affect, as a Unix hacker, and reacts
with a certain mixture of nervousness, awe, and hostility. Dilbert
jabs weakly at the disturbing interloper for a couple of frames;
the Unix hacker listens with a kind of infuriating, beatific calm,
then, in the last frame, reaches into his pocket. "Here's a nickel,
kid," he says, "go buy yourself a real computer."
(3) the owner of the door, and the cartoon, was one Doug Barnes.
Barnes was known to harbor certain heretical opinions on the
subject of operating systems. Unlike most Bay Area techies who
revered the Macintosh, considering it to be a true hacker's
machine, Barnes was fond of pointing out that the Mac, with its
hermetically sealed architecture, was actually hostile to hackers,
who are prone to tinkering and dogmatic about openness. By
contrast, the IBM-compatible line of machines, which can easily be
taken apart and plugged back together, was much more hackable.
So when I got home I began messing around with Linux, which is one
of many, many different concrete implementations of the abstract,
Platonic ideal called Unix. I was not looking forward to changing
over to a new OS, because my credit cards were still smoking from
all the money I'd spent on Mac hardware over the years. But Linux's
great virtue was, and is, that it would run on exactly the same
sort of hardware as the Microsoft OSes--which is to say, the
cheapest hardware in existence. As if to demonstrate why this was a
great idea, I was, within a week or two of returning home, able to
get my hand on a then-decent computer (a 33-MHz 486 box) for free,
because I knew a guy who worked in an office where they were simply
being thrown away. Once I got it home, I yanked the hood off, stuck
my hands in, and began switching cards around. If something didn't
work, I went to a used-computer outlet and pawed through a bin full
of components and bought a new card for a few bucks.
The availability of all this cheap but effective hardware was an
unintended consequence of decisions that had been made more than a
decade earlier by IBM and Microsoft. When Windows came out, and
brought the GUI to a much larger market, the hardware regime
changed: the cost of color video cards and high-resolution monitors
began to drop, and is dropping still. This free-for-all approach to
hardware meant that Windows was unavoidably clunky compared to
MacOS. But the GUI brought computing to such a vast audience that
volume went way up and prices collapsed. Meanwhile Apple, which so
badly wanted a clean, integrated OS with video neatly integrated
into processing hardware, had fallen far behind in market share, at
least partly because their beautiful hardware cost so much.
But the price that we Mac owners had to pay for superior aesthetics
and engineering was not merely a financial one. There was a
cultural price too, stemming from the fact that we couldn't open up
the hood and mess around with it. Doug Barnes was right. Apple, in
spite of its reputation as the machine of choice of scruffy,
creative hacker types, had actually created a machine that
discouraged hacking, while Microsoft, viewed as a technological
laggard and copycat, had created a vast, disorderly parts bazaar--a
primordial soup that eventually self-assembled into Linux.
THE HOLE HAWG OF OPERATING SYSTEMS
Unix has always lurked provocatively in the background of the
operating system wars, like the Russian Army. Most people know it
only by reputation, and its reputation, as the Dilbert cartoon
suggests, is mixed. But everyone seems to agree that if it could
only get its act together and stop surrendering vast tracts of rich
agricultural land and hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war to
the onrushing invaders, it could stomp them (and all other
opposition) flat.
It is difficult to explain how Unix has earned this respect without
going into mind-smashing technical detail. Perhaps the gist of it
can be explained by telling a story about drills.
The Hole Hawg is a drill made by the Milwaukee Tool Company. If you
look in a typical hardware store you may find smaller Milwaukee
drills but not the Hole Hawg, which is too powerful and too
expensive for homeowners. The Hole Hawg does not have the
pistol-like design of a cheap homeowner's drill. It is a cube of
solid metal with a handle sticking out of one face and a chuck
mounted in another. The cube contains a disconcertingly potent
electric motor. You can hold the handle and operate the trigger
with your index finger, but unless you are exceptionally strong you
cannot control the weight of the Hole Hawg with one hand; it is a
two-hander all the way. In order to fight off the counter-torque of
the Hole Hawg you use a separate handle (provided), which you screw
into one side of the iron cube or the other depending on whether
you are using your left or right hand to operate the trigger. This
handle is not a sleek, ergonomically designed item as it would be
in a homeowner's drill. It is simply a foot-long chunk of regular
galvanized pipe, threaded on one end, with a black rubber handle on
the other. If you lose it, you just go to the local plumbing supply
store and buy another chunk of pipe.
During the Eighties I did some construction work. One day, another
worker leaned a ladder against the outside of the building that we
were putting up, climbed up to the second-story level, and used the
Hole Hawg to drill a hole through the exterior wall. At some point,
the drill bit caught in the wall. The Hole Hawg, following its one
and only imperative, kept going. It spun the worker's body around
like a rag doll, causing him to knock his own ladder down.
Fortunately he kept his grip on the Hole Hawg, which remained
lodged in the wall, and he simply dangled from it and shouted for
help until someone came along and reinstated the ladder.
I myself used a Hole Hawg to drill many holes through studs, which
it did as a blender chops cabbage. I also used it to cut a few
six-inch-diameter holes through an old lath-and-plaster ceiling. I
chucked in a new hole saw, went up to the second story, reached
down between the newly installed floor joists, and began to cut
through the first-floor ceiling below. Where my homeowner's drill
had labored and whined to spin the huge bit around, and had stalled
at the slightest obstruction, the Hole Hawg rotated with the stupid
consistency of a spinning planet. When the hole saw seized up, the
Hole Hawg spun itself and me around, and crushed one of my hands
between the steel pipe handle and a joist, producing a few
lacerations, each surrounded by a wide corona of deeply bruised
flesh. It also bent the hole saw itself, though not so badly that I
couldn't use it. After a few such run-ins, when I got ready to use
the Hole Hawg my heart actually began to pound with atavistic
terror.
But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. The Hole Hawg is
dangerous because it does exactly what you tell it to. It is not
bound by the physical limitations that are inherent in a cheap
drill, and neither is it limited by safety interlocks that might be
built into a homeowner's product by a liability-conscious
manufacturer. The danger lies not in the machine itself but in the
user's failure to envision the full consequences of the
instructions he gives to it.
A smaller tool is dangerous too, but for a completely different
reason: it tries to do what you tell it to, and fails in some way
that is unpredictable and almost always undesirable. But the Hole
Hawg is like the genie of the ancient fairy tales, who carries out
his master's instructions literally and precisely and with
unlimited power, often with disastrous, unforeseen consequences.
Pre-Hole Hawg, I used to examine the drill selection in hardware
stores with what I thought was a judicious eye, scorning the
smaller low-end models and hefting the big expensive ones
appreciatively, wishing I could afford one of them babies. Now I
view them all with such contempt that I do not even consider them
to be real drills--merely scaled-up toys designed to exploit the
self-delusional tendencies of soft-handed homeowners who want to
believe that they have purchased an actual tool. Their plastic
casings, carefully designed and focus-group-tested to convey a
feeling of solidity and power, seem disgustingly flimsy and cheap
to me, and I am ashamed that I was ever bamboozled into buying such
knicknacks.
It is not hard to imagine what the world would look like to someone
who had been raised by contractors and who had never used any drill
other than a Hole Hawg. Such a person, presented with the best and
most expensive hardware-store drill, would not even recognize it as
such. He might instea
