Excerpts from <a href="http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html">
In the Beginning was the Command Line</a>
a long essay by cybernovelist Neal Stephenson
<p>
Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at
all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in
a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are
making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks;
these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age
materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the
other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in
such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and
maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel
than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot,
at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the
edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can
simply climb into one and drive it away for free.

<hr>


In other words, the first thing that Apple's hackers had done when
they'd got the MacOS up and running--probably even before they'd
gotten it up and running--was to re-create the Unix interface, so that
they would be able to get some useful work done. At the time, I simply
couldn't get my mind around this, but: as far as Apple's hackers were
concerned, the Mac's vaunted Graphical User Interface was an
impediment, something to be circumvented before the little toaster
even came out onto the market.  

<hr>



Unix is the Hole Hawg of operating systems, and Unix hackers, like
Doug Barnes and the guy in the Dilbert cartoon and many of the other
people who populate Silicon Valley, are like contractor's sons who
grew up using only Hole Hawgs. They might use Apple/Microsoft OSes to
write letters, play video games, or balance their checkbooks, but they
cannot really bring themselves to take these operating systems
seriously.
<hr>

After this kind of thing has happened several hundred or thousand
times, the hacker understands why Unix is the way it is, and agrees
that it wouldn't be the same any other way. It is this sort of
acculturation that gives Unix hackers their confidence in the system,
and the attitude of calm, unshakable, annoying superiority captured in
the Dilbert cartoon. Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by
engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is
not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history
of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.

<hr>




For at least a year, prior to my adoption of Linux, I had been hearing
about it. Credible, well-informed people kept telling me that a bunch
of hackers had got together an implentation of Unix that could be
downloaded, free of charge, from the Internet. For a long time I could
not bring myself to take the notion seriously. It was like hearing
rumors that a group of model rocket enthusiasts had created a
completely functional Saturn V by exchanging blueprints on the Net and
mailing valves and flanges to each other.  

<hr>


ASCII text files, in other words, are telegrams, and as such they have no typographical frills. But for the same reason they are eternal, because the code never changes, and universal, because every text editing and word processing software ever written knows about this code.


<hr>

universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34 -protonmass 1.673e-27