[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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