Business - Written Monday, July 6, 2009 by Jeff DeChambeau - 0 Comments

A Brief History of OSes

Last month I read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. It’s one of those books that throws your ideas about the nature of the world up in the air, leaving them differently-arranged  when they land. If you’re at all a fan of scifi or cyberpunk, I wholeheartedly recommend it.

The title, Snow Crash, comes from a 1999 essay that Stephenson wrote about the history of Operating Systems. The lengthy essay, titled In the Beginning… Was the Command Line (avaible for free download here), is one part history lesson, one part cultural critique, and one part personal narrative; Stephenson intertwines the fight between Microsoft and Apple with the development of the modern operating system and his own personal narrative in which he migrates from Apple to Linux.

Stephenson starts with the hacker (in the non-pejorative sense) view that since the operating system really nothing but information, the idea of paying for an operating system is a bit absurd, it’s just pieces of data processing other pieces of data; Bill Gates’ master move was convincing the world that they should pay for something that by its very nature should be free. Further to this, being a shrewd businessman, Gates only made Windows as good as it needed to be to sell; aesthetics just weren’t important. Apple, being a hardware company focused on providing seamless user experiences, took the time to make their OS shine — much to their own detriment. Continue…