In the Beginning...Was the Command Line Read Free Page A

computers, we were very close to the bottom of that stack. When we use most modern operatingsystems, though, our interaction with the machine is heavily mediated. Everything we do is interpreted and translated time and again as it works its way down through all of the metaphors and abstractions.
    The Macintosh OS was a revolution in both the good and bad senses of that word. Obviously it was true that command line interfaces were not for everyone, and that it would be a good thing to make computers more accessible to a less technical audience—if not for altruistic reasons, then because those sorts of people constituted an incomparably vaster market. It was clear that the Mac’s engineers saw a whole new country stretching out before them; you could almost hear them muttering, “Wow! We don’t have to be bound by files as linear streams of bytes anymore, vive la revolution , let’s see how far we can take this!” No command line interface was available on the Macintosh; you talked to it with the mouse, or not at all. This was a statement of sorts, a credential of revolutionary purity. It seemed that the designers of the Mac intended to sweep command line interfaces into the dustbin of history.
    My own personal love affair with the Macintosh began in the spring of 1984 in a computer store in Cedar Rap-ids, Iowa, when a friend of mine—coincidentally, the son of the MGB owner—showed me a Macintosh running MacPaint, the revolutionary drawing program. It ended in July of 1995 when I tried to save a big important file on my Macintosh PowerBook and instead of doing so, it annihilated the data so thoroughly that two different disk crash utility programs were unable to find any tracethat it had ever existed. During the intervening ten years, I had a passion for the MacOS that seemed righteous and reasonable at the time but in retrospect strikes me as being exactly the same sort of goofy infatuation that my friend’s dad had with his car.
    The introduction of the Mac triggered a sort of holy war in the computer world. Were GUIs a brilliant design innovation that made computers more human-centered and therefore accessible to the masses, leading us toward an unprecedented revolution in human society, or an insulting bit of audiovisual gimcrackery dreamed up by flaky Bay Area hacker types that stripped computers of their power and flexibility and turned the noble and serious work of computing into a childish video game?
    This debate actually seems more interesting to me today than it did in the mid-1980s. But people more or less stopped debating it when Microsoft endorsed the idea of GUIs by coming out with the first Windows system. At this point, command-line partisans were relegated to the status of silly old grouches, and a new conflict was touched off: between users of MacOS and users of Windows. *
    There was plenty to argue about. The first Macintoshes looked different from other PCs even when they were turned off: they consisted of one box containing both CPU (the part of the computer that does arithmetic on bits) and monitor screen. This was billed, at the time, as a philosophical statement of sorts: Apple wanted to make the personal computer into an appliance, like a toaster. But it also reflected the purely technical demands of running a graphical user interface. In a GUI machine, the chips that draw things on the screen have to be integrated with the computer’s central processing unit, or CPU, to a far greater extent than is the case with command line interfaces, which until recently didn’t even know that they weren’t just talking to teletypes.
    This distinction was of a technical and abstract nature, but it became clearer when the machine crashed. (It is commonly the case with technologies that you can get the best insight about how they work by watching them fail.) When everything went to hell and the CPU began spewing out random bits, the result, on a CLI machine, was lines and lines of perfectly formed but