Notes from In the Beginning was the Command Line

Notes from Neal Stepheson’s In the Beginning was the Command Line.

• HTML as a telegram; one-way and non-interactive (obviously written before AJAX…).

  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.

• Culture’s ok

  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…is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being…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.

• And so are interfaces, even those that disassociate you a bit from the “guts” of the system.

  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.

• The pathological behavior of corporations inhibits their products and their support.

  Commercial OS companies like Apple and Microsoft can’t go around admitting that their software has bugs and that it crashes all the time, any more than Disney can issue press releases stating that Mickey Mouse is an actor in a suit…Of course, this behavior is not as pathological in a corporation as it would be in a human being.

• How feature creep happens; because of GUIs…

  GUIs tend to impose a large overhead on every single piece of software, even the smallest, and this overhead completely changes the programming environment. Small utility programs are no longer worth writing. Their functions, instead, tend to get swallowed up into omnibus software packages.

• The universe as an operating system much like Ed Fredkin in Robert Wright’s Three Scientists and Their Gods:

  Somewhere outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system, coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge…The demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command line after another…and when he’s finished typing out the command line, his right pinky hesitates above the ENTER key for an aeon or two, wondering what’s going to happen; then down it comes–and the WHACK you hear is another Big Bang.

• I disagree with Stepheson; I think this interface would be pretty cool, like the logical extension of the experience economy into the transformation economy into the “life” economy.

  After a few releases the software would begin to look even simpler: you would boot it up and it would present you with a dialog box with a single large button in the middle labeled: LIVE. Once you had clicked that button, your life would begin.

• A wonderful interface designer’s creedo follows from this idea:

  What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem, and enumerated all of the dissatisfactions in your life? He would probably tell you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don’t like having choices made for you, you should start making your own.