In The Beginning... Was The Command Line

In my continuing quest to read everything Neal Stephenson has ever written I read In The Beginning... Was The Command Line. It is his take on operating systems when it was written in 1999. Given when it was written there are few people I would recommend it to (if you read this blog and you were in AEPi then it might be worth checking out). Although, if you are in that group then you know most everything the book says (although Neal does come up with some colorful analogies, which is actually a bit odd since a major portion of the book is talking about the issues with using a GUI as an analogy for what is really happening in a computer).

In the end he recommends BeOS which has since died. Although most of the reasons for recommending BeOS (fresh start and combination of GUI with access to command line interface) could be applied to Mac OS X (as he mentions here in response to question 8). I was a bit disappointed to find out that Neal is an emacs guy, although I probably would have been too if not for a certain roommate steering me in the right direction. For the last few pages he goes off into craziness as required of any Stephenson book (actually it is impressive that he touches on the ideas Seth Lloyd talks about in Programming the Universe which came out 7 years later).