Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

web.stanford.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 271 posts

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#161

Post by BenjiWiebe »

xg15 wrote: post #68
lukan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"By what I assume would be some project contributor ssh-ing into your machine" Who would want that? "Stay away from my house, you freak!" would be the normal reaction. Unless some serious trust is developed, I would not let people into my house while I sleep. Also the actual usual reaction would have been more like: "hey it is open source, you can fix anything on your tank yourself" You need a new module to connect w…

I know you shouldn't look too closely at analogies, but I think there is an interesting inconsistency in the "car dealerships" story: The tank people offer to send someone to look into the car (rsp. tank) but the buyer rejects them from entering their house . That's significant, because a car is much less private than a house. In the real world, if my car had an issue, it would be perfectly reasonable to give it into…

I'd say the reputation of dealerships is why independent repair shops exist. :)

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#162

Post by Phiwise_ »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #127
Phiwise_ wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Obsolete" is too strong a word, I think. OSX isn't an evolution of the Macintosh's operating system; That'd be Pink, which was even mentioned, and it crashed and burned. OSX was far closer to a Linux box and a Mac box on the same desk, therefore the only change really needed is to replace mentions of Unix or specifically Linux with Linux/OSX as far as the points of the piece are concerned. If Jobs had paid Torvalds…

> OSX was far closer to a Linux box and a Mac box on the same desk Setting aside the "more BSD/Mach than Linux", OS X pressed a lot of the same buttons that BeOS did: a GUI system that let you drop to a Unix CLI (in Be's case, Posix rather than Unix, if we're going to be persnickety), but whose GUI was sufficiently complete that users rarely, if ever, had to use the CLI to get things done. Folks who love the CLI (hi,…

>Given that OS X has supported multi-button mice since 2001, I certainly believe that.

Just a joke, mate.

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#163

Post by Phiwise_ »

wpm wrote: post #125
Phiwise_ wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Obsolete" is too strong a word, I think. OSX isn't an evolution of the Macintosh's operating system; That'd be Pink, which was even mentioned, and it crashed and burned. OSX was far closer to a Linux box and a Mac box on the same desk, therefore the only change really needed is to replace mentions of Unix or specifically Linux with Linux/OSX as far as the points of the piece are concerned. If Jobs had paid Torvalds…

macOS shares zero lineage with Linux, which itself shares zero lineage with the UNIX derivatives. It would make zero sense for Apple to call macOS "Apple Linux" when it doesn't use the Linux kernel. Mac OS X is closest to a NeXTStep box with a coat of Mac-like polish on top. Even calling it "Apple Berkeley Unix" wouldn't make sense, because the XNU kernel is a mish mash of both BSD 4.3 and the Mach kernel. Linux and…

>OS X is closest to a NeXTStep

This is already in the piece. Why waste time repeating it?

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#164

Post by anthk »

Gormo wrote: post #147
anthk wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When some big shit hits the fan either with ChatGPT or internet connections, the only people able to fix systems without an internet connection will be us, the millenials. The rest will be prompty fired in the spot.

I've found that as far as generational cohorts go, the most adept people are the late Gen-Xers and very early Millenials -- the people who grew up surrounded by C64s and Apple IIs and later had to fiddle with their config.sys and autoexec.bat files to get their game to fit into conventional memory. People whose first exposure to computing was in the mid-'90s or later seem to have less depth of understanding of the fu…

Yeah, these too. But lots of millenials learnt with RedHat, Debian and they knew a bit of DOS for some issues with Windows 98 and potential recovering from disasters. Still, far more able than the ChatGPT aided people blindly pasting commands into a shell being a recipe for a huge disaster.

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#166

Post by dylan604 »

Phiwise_ wrote: post #163
wpm wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

macOS shares zero lineage with Linux, which itself shares zero lineage with the UNIX derivatives. It would make zero sense for Apple to call macOS "Apple Linux" when it doesn't use the Linux kernel. Mac OS X is closest to a NeXTStep box with a coat of Mac-like polish on top. Even calling it "Apple Berkeley Unix" wouldn't make sense, because the XNU kernel is a mish mash of both BSD 4.3 and the Mach kernel. Linux and…

>OS X is closest to a NeXTStep This is already in the piece. Why waste time repeating it?

Because the person they replied to used a term like Apple Linux which is ridiculous. So somebody on the internet was wrong and needed to be corrected

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#167

Post by [deleted] »

rewgs wrote: post #158
llm_trw wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given what OS X has become it's un-obsoleted itself again. It's kind of ironic that you're using a post from 20 years ago to invalidate an essay from 25 years ago, about an OS that's been substantially dumbed down in the last 10 years. Bad corporate blood will tell.

I will never understand the sentiment that macOS has been “dumbed down.” It’s a zsh shell with BSD utils. 99% of my shell setup/tools on Linux just work on macOS. I can easily install the gnu utils if I want 99.9% similarity. I very happily jump between macOS and Linux, and while the desktop experience is always potentially the best on Linux (IMO nothing compares to hyprland), in practice macOS feels like the most po…

[deleted]

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#168

Post by charonn0 »

xg15 wrote: post #68
lukan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"By what I assume would be some project contributor ssh-ing into your machine" Who would want that? "Stay away from my house, you freak!" would be the normal reaction. Unless some serious trust is developed, I would not let people into my house while I sleep. Also the actual usual reaction would have been more like: "hey it is open source, you can fix anything on your tank yourself" You need a new module to connect w…

I know you shouldn't look too closely at analogies, but I think there is an interesting inconsistency in the "car dealerships" story: The tank people offer to send someone to look into the car (rsp. tank) but the buyer rejects them from entering their house . That's significant, because a car is much less private than a house. In the real world, if my car had an issue, it would be perfectly reasonable to give it into…

Obviously a computer is like an an RV.

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#169

Post by fake-name »

_yb2s wrote: post #129
llm_trw wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given what OS X has become it's un-obsoleted itself again. It's kind of ironic that you're using a post from 20 years ago to invalidate an essay from 25 years ago, about an OS that's been substantially dumbed down in the last 10 years. Bad corporate blood will tell.

In what way has it been “dumbed down?” I use modern MacOS as a Unix software development workstation and it works great- nothing substantial has changed in 20 years other than better package managers. I suppose they did remove X11 but it’s trivial to install yourself.

OS X started going down hill as soon as they replaces spaces and expose with mission control.

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#170

Post by almog »

I still remember one of the quotes from The Metaphor Shear chapter, where he tried to explain how he felt after some of his files on his Mac got corrupted to such degree that he just couldn't recover: "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."
Post reply on HN