My first 486DX PC had a "turbo" button.
You press it - and it wasn't just a teletype anymore.
In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)
211–220 of 271 posts
Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)
#212Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)
#213Earlier 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.
With each new version it has become increasingly hostile to installing new software, particularly open-source software that hasn't been "signed" by a commercial developer, throwing up huge warning windows suggesting that anyone daring to run such stuff is taking a huge risk. And many of the standard UNIX locations have become locked down making it impossible to install stuff there. It's clear that Apple would like to see a world where everything is installed on a Mac via their App Store and everyone writing Mac software are official paid developers as with their phones.
Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)
#214This essay by Neal Stephenson was first published in 1999. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_... The analogy of OS as cars (Windows is a station wagon, Linux is a tank) is brought up in the recent Acquired episode on Microsoft, where Vista was a Dodge Viper but Windows 7 was a Toyota Camry, which is what users actually wanted.
I didn’t know myself let alone computers but anyone know why Vista and Windows 8 got such bad reps?
I'm one of the few people who thought Vista was fine. It mostly got a bad rap because of bad drivers and high system requirements.
Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)
#215This essay by Neal Stephenson was first published in 1999. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_... The analogy of OS as cars (Windows is a station wagon, Linux is a tank) is brought up in the recent Acquired episode on Microsoft, where Vista was a Dodge Viper but Windows 7 was a Toyota Camry, which is what users actually wanted.
The way I explained my continued loathing of Microsoft to a friend was that back in the day, it was like having two choices of car: a Ford Pinto, or a pickup truck. Not everybody needed the heavy transport capabilities of the pickup, but their only choice if they didn't want the added bulk and fuel consumption was the Pinto, which had dangerous failure modes. Later, the Pinto would be withdrawn and replaced with a Ford Taurus, a serviceable but not particularly fun or performant vehicle which worked fine usually, but was based on a transaxle design, so when it did break you had to dismantle the entire front end of the vehicle in order to repair it. And now imagine that there were roads you couldn't drive on and places you couldn't go unless you had one of these three vehicles, simply due to Ford's market pressure on infrastructure planners, not for any good reason; and besides, people mocked you for wanting something else.
Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)
#216This essay by Neal Stephenson was first published in 1999. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_... The analogy of OS as cars (Windows is a station wagon, Linux is a tank) is brought up in the recent Acquired episode on Microsoft, where Vista was a Dodge Viper but Windows 7 was a Toyota Camry, which is what users actually wanted.
And Neal Stephenson acknowledged it was obsolete in 2004: " I embraced OS X as soon as it was available and have never looked back. So a lot of 'In the beginning was the command line' is now obsolete. I keep meaning to update it, but if I'm honest with myself, I have to say this is unlikely. " https://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-... But people still dredge this quarter century old apocrypha up…
> 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.
Neal said the essay was quickly obsolete, especially in regards to Mac, but I'll always remember this reference about hermetically sealed Apple products. To this day, Apple doesn't want anyone to know how their products work, or how to fix them, to the point where upgrading or expanding internal hardware is mostly impossible.
Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)
#217One major advantage of the CLI is that instructions/fixes etc are very concise and can be easily communicated. If someone has a Linux system that needs a known fix, then it's trivial to send someone the commands to copy/paste into a terminal. However, if there's a known fix for a graphical program, then it suddenly becomes much harder to communicate - do you go for a textual instruction (e.g. click on the hamburger m…
This seems to deny the possibility of equivalence of any sequence of actions taken in a bounded spaces of entities (named widgets thus type:id) and actions to another 'representation' (e.g. text): { select[i]@dropdown:states > click@button:submit } The fact that we don't have this (yet) does not mean it is not possible. In fact, given that the current darling of tech LLMs can 'compute visually' based on tokens (text)…
I really wish one of the little GUI frameworks would develop this, but alas, the evidence is that "nobody" actually wants this. As evidenced by the things like Applescript that existed, and died.
I feel like it could be done if it was really a goal from day one, and there were things like "record this set of actions as a script" built into the toolkit. Even Applescript was still an afterthought, I think, albeit a very well supported one.
In the meantime, given the comprehensive failure of UI toolkits to support this style, it is completely fair for people to act and speak as if it doesn't exist.
Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scripts are UI glue in more than one sense. The usual interpretation is that scripts glue together system commands that don't otherwise incorporate one another. This is tremendously useful and is by itself a huge advantage over GUIs. But the second sense is that vast libraries of scripts keep developers bound to their previous UI promises . You don't capriciously change command-line options without raising all kinds…
There's also a lot of text based tools that are designed to be used as part of a script and don't provide much functionality in themselves - the philosophy of do one thing (and do it well). GUIs tend to be designed to provide the entire functionality that's wanted and little thought is given to them being used as part of a toolchain.
Right. CLIs / TUIs offer composability. GUIs don't.
If someone makes a GUI that does specifically what you want, you're in luck. If not, you're S.O.L.
With CLIs, you can almost always find some way to string things together to get what it is you want.
The hard case is working in domains which aren't inherently textual: graphics, audio, video, etc. Even there, you can often get much more accomplished from the terminal than you'd think, though setting up the process can be challenging at times. Not so useful for one-offs, but invaluable for repetitive processes.
Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)
#219Earlier 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…
Your statement seems very strong. Is Mac OS X not based on Darwin? Are you defining "lineage" in some way to only mean licensing and exclude the shared ideas (a kernel manipulating files)? Thanks for the "carcinisation" link.
Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)
#220Earlier 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…
Your statement seems very strong. Is Mac OS X not based on Darwin? Are you defining "lineage" in some way to only mean licensing and exclude the shared ideas (a kernel manipulating files)? Thanks for the "carcinisation" link.
To be more precise: this simplified history suggests a shared "lineage" back to the original UNIXes of all of BSDs (and hence Darwin and OSX) and of the GNU/Linux and other OSes https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/3202
So, "zero shared lineage" seems like a very strong statement.