Command Line Interface

A step below porn in the amount of internet content generated is the space devoted to the Mac vs. PC argument. The information contained is largely redundant but in this old essay by Neil Stephenson there are some honest attempts to look at not only the whats but the whys.

Some nice bits. Apple as commune:

But even from this remove it was possible to glean certain patterns, and one that recurred as regularly as an urban legend was the one about how someone would move into a commune populated by sandal-wearing, peace-sign flashing flower children, and eventually discover that, underneath this facade, the guys who ran it were actually control freaks; and that, as living in a commune, where much lip service was paid to ideals of peace, love and harmony, had deprived them of normal, socially approved outlets for their control-freakdom, it tended to come out in other, invariably more sinister, ways.

Applying this to the case of Apple Computer will be left as an exercise for the reader, and not a very difficult exercise.

If the car were invented today.

The internal combustion engine was a technological marvel in its day, but useless as a consumer good until a clutch, transmission, steering wheel and throttle were connected to it. That odd collection of gizmos, which survives to this day in every car on the road, made up what we would today call a user interface. But if cars had been invented after Macintoshes, carmakers would not have bothered to gin up all of these arcane devices. We would have a computer screen instead of a dashboard, and a mouse (or at best a joystick) instead of a steering wheel, and we'd shift gears by pulling down a menu:

PARK --- REVERSE --- NEUTRAL ---- 3 2 1 --- Help...

A few lines of computer code can thus be made to substitute for any imaginable mechanical interface. The problem is that in many cases the substitute is a poor one.

A number of major assertions are not followed through-

• That Apple is a hardware company. It's a Motorola chip, an Nvidia graphics card, etc. Obviously they are putting a lot of effort into the user experience and part of that is the software.
• That there is an overriding benefit to all the power and transparency that Linux gives you. Many of his experiences tend to indicate the opposite of this- the months he spent working on a problem, the notebooks filled, the massive amount of initial knowledge required.
• That the fact that he lost a document in Microsoft Word causes "metaphor shear"- something where a metaphor he has treasured turns out to be abruptly wrong and makes his brain hurt. He doesn't seem to realize that documents are sometimes lost in the real world.
  

If reading this has made your eyes glaze over the essay won't be any better but if not, if for some reason you need this kind of thing, it's a refreshing change.