Neal Stephenson’s “In the Beginning was the Command Line”

This slim volume on the history of operating system development, written in 1999, is way more entertaining than the subject would seem to indicate. Using vivid metaphor, Neal compares each of the major OSes to car dealerships selling and marketing the following vehicles:

Microsoft Windows 95 = station wagon
Microsoft NT = hulking off-road vehicle for industrial users
Apple = European sedan
BeOS = Batmobile
Linux = free tanks

One of the central questions of the book is whether there is a future in the OS business for the major non-free providers. Since the book’s publication, we’ve learned the answer for at least one of them - apparently selling and marketing Batmobiles ended up being too much of a niche market for BeOS…

The far more interesting question is about the industry Goliath, Microsoft. Can it be that Microsoft has over-defended their desktop dominance when they should be concentrating on complex application development (which they are also really good at)? Is Microsoft doomed to suffer a new flavor of Apple’s classic blunder? Recall that Apple used to be the largest OS maker in the world. In hindsight, they handed the market to Microsoft by refusing to sacrifice their hardware division. Microsoft worked solely on the higher-margin software that could operate across many more hardware platforms and ended up commoditizing what had been a niche industry.

Fast-forward to today, Microsoft currently enjoys a market-dominating share of the OS marketplace. Will they lose out to a new breed of competitor while protecting their dominant position at all costs? Will they forget to jump when the time comes? While they protect their competitive moat from competitors, their competitors are developing some pretty big catapults. A whole army of next generation dev-shops are creating efficient (and free) OSes and new waves of applications that are OS-agnostic, accomplish much of the same work as Microsoft’s applications and cost much less money (or come for free).

Who wants to be in the OS industry anyways?

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.

Another interesting analogy of the ever-competitive OS landscape is the following:

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 beneath 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 os 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.”

While certain of the facts of this book are dated (Apple’s new OS X can access the underlying command line, directly in contradiction to certain points about abstraction which Neal was making) it is the recurring cyclical themes that drive the essay and yield real food for thought. We learn about Americans’ ingrained love of mediated experiences, the need for UI, and that the current complexities of life demand levels of abstraction never before necessary. The questions become what interfaces do we allow ourselves and what do we give up in the process of this abstraction?

This is a wonderfully entertaining book for any non-coder trying to get a basic understanding of general OS concepts and history or any coder trying to understand the generalities of the marketplace in which these OSes exist. It’s an entertaining middle ground ripe for debate.