Free In the Beginning...Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson Page A

according to a clever and elegant set of rules.
    But sending a packet of data is one thing, and so an OS that can only do one thing at a time cannot simultaneously be part of the Internet and do anything else. When TCP/IP was invented, running it was an honor reserved for Serious Computers—mainframes and high-powered minicomputers used in technical and commercial settings—and so the protocol is engineered around the assumption that every computer using it is a serious machine, capable of doing many things at once. Not to put too fine a point on it, a Unix machine. Neither MacOS nor MS-DOS was originally built with that in mind, and so when the Internet got hot, radical changes had to be made.
    When my PowerBook broke my heart, and when Word stopped recognizing my old files, I jumped to Unix. The obvious alternative to MacOS would have been Windows. I didn’t really have anything against Microsoft or Windows. But it was pretty obvious, now, that old PC operating systems were overreaching and showing the strain and, perhaps, were best avoided until they had learned to walk and chew gum at the same time.
    The changeover took place on a particular day in the summer of 1995. I had been in San Francisco for a couple of weeks, using my PowerBook to work on a document. The document was too big to fit onto a single floppy, and so I hadn’t made a backup since leaving home. The PowerBook crashed and wiped out the entire file.
    It happened just as I was on my way out the door to visit a company called Electric Communities, which in those days was in Los Altos. I took my PowerBook with me. My friends at Electric Communities were Mac users who had all sorts of utility software for unerasing files and recovering from disk crashes, and I was certain I could get most of the file back.
    As it turned out, two different Mac crash recovery utilities were unable to find any trace that my file had ever existed. It was completely and systematically wiped out. We went through that hard disk block by block and found disjointed fragments of countless old, discarded, forgotten files, but none of what I wanted. The metaphor shear was especially brutal that day. It was sort of like watching the girl you’ve been in love with for ten years get killed in a car wreck, then attending her autopsy, and learning that underneath the clothes and makeup she was just flesh and blood.
    I must have been reeling around the offices of Electric Communities in some kind of primal Jungian fugue, because at this moment three weirdly synchronistic things happened.
(1) Randy Farmer, a cofounder of the company, came in for a quick visit along with his family—he wasrecovering from back surgery at the time. He had some hot gossip: “Windows 95 mastered today.” What this meant was that Microsoft’s new operating system had, on this day, been placed on a special compact disk known as a golden master, which would be used to stamp out a jintillion copies in preparation for its thunderous release a few weeks later. This news was received peevishly by the staff of Electric Communities, including one whose office door was plastered with the usual assortment of cartoons and novelties, e.g.:
(2) A copy of a Dilbert cartoon in which Dilbert, the long-suffering corporate software engineer, encounters a portly, bearded, hairy man of a certain age—a bit like Santa Claus, but darker, with a certain edge about him. Dilbert recognizes this man, based upon his appearance and affect, as a Unix hacker, and reacts with a certain mixture of nervousness, awe, and hostility. Dilbert jabs weakly at the disturbing interloper for a couple of frames; the Unix hacker listens with a kind of infuriating, beatific calm, then, in the last frame, reaches into his pocket. “Here’s a nickel, kid,” he says, “go buy yourself a real computer.”
(3) The owner of the door, and the cartoon, was one Doug Barnes. Barnes was known to harbor certain heretical opinions on the subject of operating