Posts Tagged ‘apple’

Review: “In the Beginning… Was the Command Line”

Saturday, January 24th, 2009

Partly due to a comment I left on Amelia Torode’s blog, I’m re-reading Neal Stephenson’s 1999 monograph In the Beginning…Was the Command Line. I get a lot of perspective from reading old books. I tend to be too caught up in the zeitgeist to read new cultural commentary with anything like the distance that’s required to draw sensible conclusions.

This particular book concerns itself with the history and nature of operating systems, how they are shaped by and reflect our wider culture, and how (in turn) they shape our society. It makes fascinating reading, but it’s been almost ten years since I last read it and much has changed.

For one thing, the future didn’t work out the way Stephenson (or anyone at the time) expected. Stephenson forecast doom for Apple, for example:

They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly.

But in 1999 when he wrote this, Apple stock was in fact just beginning to recover from its disastrous performance in the mid nineties.
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