[OT] Neal Stephenson on OS's
Rob Withers
slosher2 at home.com
Tue Jul 18 08:49:32 UTC 2000
John Clonts wrote:
>
> Neal Stephenson, author of "Snow Crash" wrote an interesting article,
> entitled "In the Beginning was the Command Line". The part that made me
> think of Squeak is:
>
> <quote>
> I was in Disney World recently, specifically the part of it called the
> Magic Kingdom, walking up Main Street USA. This is a perfect
> gingerbready Victorian small town that culminates in a Disney castle. It
> was very crowded; we shuffled rather than walked. Directly in front of
> me was a man with a camcorder. It was one of the new breed of camcorders
> where instead of peering through a viewfinder you gaze at a flat-panel
> color screen about the size of a playing card, which televises live
> coverage of whatever the camcorder is seeing. He was holding the
> appliance close to his face, so that it obstructed his view. Rather than
> go see a real small town for free, he had paid money to see a pretend
> one, and rather than see it with the naked eye he was watching it on
> television.
>
> And rather than stay home and read a book, I was watching him.
>
> Americans' preference for mediated experiences is obvious enough, and
> I'm not going to keep pounding it into the ground. I'm not even going to
> make snotty comments about it--after all, I was at Disney World as a
> paying customer. But it clearly relates to the colossal success of GUIs
> and so I have to talk about it some. Disney does mediated experiences
> better than anyone. If they understood what OSes are, and why people use
> them, they could crush Microsoft in a year or two.
> </quote>
>
> Cheers,
> John
>
> P.S. I also like his "...the Ten Commandments carved in immutable
> stone--the original command-line interface-- ..."
I just read that book recently. How far off are we from the Multiverse,
do you think?
Rob
--
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Smalltalking by choice. Isn't it nice to have one!
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