In the Beginning...Was the Command Line

by Neal Stephenson

  Indeed, none of it makes sense until you remember that the founder of the company, Jean-Louis Gassee, is from France—a country that for many years maintained its own separate and independent version of the English monarchy at a court in St. Germaines, complete with courtiers, coronation ceremonies, a state religion, and a foreign policy. Now, the same annoying yet admirable stiff-neckedness that gave us the Jacobites, the force de frappe, Airbus, and Arret signs in Quebec has brought us a really cool operating system. I fart in your general direction, Anglo-Saxon pig-dogs!

  To create an entirely new OS from scratch, just because none of the existing ones was exactly right, struck me as an act of such colossal nerve that I felt compelled to support it. I bought a BeBox as soon as I could. The BeBox was a dual-processor machine, powered by Motorola chips, made specifically to run the BeOS; it could not run any other operating system. That’s why I bought it. I felt it was a way to burn my bridges. Its most distinctive feature is two columns of LEDs on the front panel that zip up and down like tachometers to convey a sense of how hard each processor is working. I thought it looked cool, and besides, I reckoned that when the company went out of business in a few months, my BeBox would be a valuable collector’s item.

  Now it is about two years later and I am typing this on my BeBox. The LEDs (Das Blinkenlights, as they are called in the Be community) flash merrily next to my right elbow as I hit the keys. Be, Inc. is still in business, though they stopped making BeBoxes almost immediately after I bought mine. They made the sad, but probably quite wise, decision that hardware was a sucker’s game, and ported the BeOS to Macintoshes and Mac clones. Since these used the same sort of Motorola chips that powered the BeBox, this wasn’t especially hard.

  Very soon afterwards, Apple strangled the Mac-clone makers and restored its hardware monopoly. So, for a while, the only new machines that could run BeOS were made by Apple.

  By this point Be, like Spiderman with his Spider-sense, had developed a keen sense of when they were about to get crushed like a bug. Even if they hadn’t, the notion of being dependent on Apple—so frail and yet so vicious—for their continued existence should have put a fright into anyone. Now engaged in their own crocodile-hopping adventure, they ported the BeOS to Intel chips—the same chips used in Windows machines. And not a moment too soon, for when Apple came out with its new top-of-the-line hardware, based on the Motorola G3 chip, they withheld the technical data that Be’s engineers would need to make the BeOS run on those machines. This would have killed Be, just like a slug between the eyes, if they hadn’t already made the jump to Intel.

  So now BeOS runs on an assortment of hardware that is almost incredibly motley: BeBoxes, aging Macs and Mac orphan-clones, and Intel machines that are intended to be used for Windows. Of course the latter type are ubiquitous and shockingly cheap nowadays, so it would appear that Be’s hardware troubles are finally over. Some German hackers have even come up with a Das Blinkenlights replacement: it’s a circuit board kit that you can plug into PC-compatible machines running BeOS to give you the zooming LED tachometers that were such a popular feature of the BeBox.

  My BeBox is already showing its age, as all computers do after a couple of years, and sooner or later I’ll probably have to replace it with an Intel machine. Even after that, though, I will still be able to use it. Because, inevitably, someone has now ported Linux to the BeBox.

  At any rate, BeOS has an extremely well-thought-out GUI built on a technological framework that is solid. It is based from the ground up on modern object-oriented software principles. BeOS software consists of quasi-independent software entities called objects, which communicate by sending messages to each other. The OS itself is made up of such objects and serves as a kind of post office or Internet that routes messages to and fro, from object to object. The OS is multithreaded, which means that like all other modern OSes it can walk and chew gum at the same time, but it gives programmers a lot of power over spawning and terminating threads, or independent subprocesses. It is also a multiprocessing OS, which means that it is inherently good at running on computers that have more than one CPU (Linux and Windows NT can also do this proficiently).

  For this user, a big selling point of BeOS is the built-in Terminal application, which enables you to open up windows that are equivalent to the xterm windows in Linux. In other words, the command line interface is available, if you want it. And because BeOS hews to a certain standard called POSIX, it is capable of running most of the GNU software. That is to say that the vast array of command line software developed by the GNU crowd will work in BeOS terminal windows without complaint. This includes the GNU development tools—the compiler and linker. And it includes all of the handy little utility programs. I’m writing this using a modern sort of user-friendly text editor called Pe, written by a Dutchman named Maarten Hekkelman. When I want to find out how long my essay is, I jump to a terminal window and run wc.

  As is suggested by the sample bug report I quoted earlier, people who work for Be and developers who write code for BeOS seem to be enjoying themselves more than their counterparts who work with other OSes. They also seem to be a more diverse lot in general. A couple of years ago I went to an auditorium at a local university to see some representatives of Be put on a dog-and-pony show. I went because I assumed that the place would be empty and echoing, and I felt that they deserved an audience of at least one. In fact, I ended up standing in an aisle, for hundreds of students had packed the place. It was like a rock concert. One of the two Be engineers on the stage was a black man, which unfortunately is a very odd thing in the high-tech world. The other made a ringing denunciation of cruft, and extolled BeOS for its cruft-free qualities, and actually came out and said that in ten or fifteen years, when BeOS had become all crufty like MacOS and Windows 95, it would be time to simply throw it away and create a new OS from scratch. I doubt that this is an official Be, Inc. policy, but it sure made a big impression on everyone in the room! During the late eighties, the MacOS was, for a time, the OS of cool people—artists and creative-minded hackers—and BeOS seems to have the potential to attract the same crowd now. Be mailing lists are crowded with hackers with names like Vladimir and Olaf and Pierre, sending flames to each other in fractured techno-English.

  The only real question about BeOS is whether or not it is doomed.

  Of late, Be has responded to the tiresome accusation that they are doomed with the assertion that BeOS is “a media operating system” made for media content creators, and hence is not really in competition with Microsoft Windows at all. This is a little bit disingenuous. To go back to the car dealership analogy, it is like the Batmobile dealer claiming that he is not really in competition with the others because his car can go three times as fast as theirs and is also capable of flying.

  Be has an office in Paris and, as mentioned, the conversation on Be mailing lists has a strongly European flavor. At the same time they have made strenuous efforts to find a niche in Japan, and Hitachi has recently begun bundling BeOS with their PCs. So if I had to make a wild guess, I’d say that they are playing Go while Microsoft is playing chess. They are staying clear, for now, of Microsoft’s overwhelmingly strong position in North America. They are trying to get themselves established around the edges of the board, as it were, in Europe and Japan, where people may be more open to alternative OSes, or at least more hostile to Microsoft, than they are in the United States.

  What holds Be back in this country is that the smart people are afraid to look like suckers. You run the risk of looking naive when you say, “I’ve tried the BeOS and here’s what I think of it.” It seems much more sophisticated to say, “Be’s chances of carving out a new niche in the highly competitive OS market are close to nil.”

  It is, in techno-speak, a problem of mindshare. And in the OS business, mindshare is more than just a PR issue; it has direct effects on the technology itself. All of the peripheral gizmos that can be hung off of a personal computer—the printers, scanners, PalmPilot inter
faces, and Lego Mindstorms—require pieces of software called drivers. Likewise, video cards and (to a lesser extent) monitors need drivers. Even the different types of motherboards on the market relate to the OS in different ways, and separate code is required for each one. All of this hardware-specific code must not only be written but also tested, debugged, upgraded, maintained, and supported. Because the hardware market has become so vast and complicated, what really determines an OS’s fate is not how good the OS is technically, or how much it costs, but rather the availability of hardware-specific code. Linux hackers have to write that code themselves, and they have done an amazingly good job of keeping up to speed. Be, Inc. has to write all their own drivers; though as BeOS has begun gathering momentum, thirdparty developers have begun to contribute drivers, which are available on Be’s website.

  But Microsoft owns the high ground at the moment, because it doesn’t have to write its own drivers. Any hardware maker bringing a new video card or peripheral device to market today knows that it will be unsalable unless it comes with the hardware-specific code that will make it work under Windows, and so each hardware maker has accepted the burden of creating and maintaining its own library of drivers.

  MINDSHARE

  The U.S. government’s assertion that Microsoft has a monopoly in the OS market might be the most patently absurd claim ever advanced by the legal mind. Linux, a technically superior operating system, is being given away for free, and BeOS is available at a nominal price. This is simply a fact, which has to be accepted whether or not you like Microsoft. Microsoft is really big and rich, and if some of the government’s witnesses are to be believed, they are not nice guys. But the accusation of a monopoly simply does not make any sense.

  What is really going on is that Microsoft has seized, for the time being, a certain type of high ground: they dominate in the competition for mindshare, and so any hardware or software maker who wants to be taken seriously feels compelled to make a product that is compatible with their operating systems. Since Windows-compatible drivers get written by the hardware makers, Microsoft doesn’t have to write them; in effect, the hardware makers are adding new components to Windows, making it a more capable OS, without charging Microsoft for the service. It is a very good position to be in. The only way to fight such an opponent is to have an army of highly competetent coders who write and distribute equivalent drivers, which Linux does.

  But possession of this psychological high ground is different from a monopoly in any normal sense of that word, because here the dominance has nothing to do with technical performance or price. The old robber-baron monopolies were monopolies because they physically controlled means of production and/or distribution. But in the software business, the means of production is hackers typing code, and the means of distribution is the Internet, and no one is claiming that Microsoft controls those.

  Here, instead, the dominance is inside the minds of people who buy software. Microsoft has power because people believe it does. This power is very real. It makes lots of money. Judging from recent legal proceedings in both Washingtons, it would appear that this power and this money have inspired some very peculiar executives to come out and work for Microsoft, and that Bill Gates should have administered saliva tests to some of them before issuing them Microsoft ID cards.

  But this is not the sort of power that fits any normal definition of the word “monopoly,” and it’s not amenable to a legal fix. The courts may order Microsoft to do things differently. They might even split the company up. But they can’t really do anything about a mindshare monopoly, short of taking every man, woman, and child in the developed world and subjecting them to a lengthy brainwashing procedure.

  Mindshare dominance is, in other words, a really odd sort of beast, something that the framers of our antitrust laws couldn’t possibly have imagined. It looks like one of these modern, wacky chaos-theory phenomena, a complexity thing, in which a whole lot of independent but connected entities (the world’s computer users), making decisions on their own, according to a few simple rules of thumb, generate a large phenomenon (total domination of the market by one company) that cannot be made sense of through any kind of rational analysis. Such phenomena are fraught with concealed tipping-points and all a-tangle with bizarre feedback loops, and cannot be understood; people who try, end up going crazy, forming crackpot theories, or becoming high-paid chaos-theory consultants.

  Now, there might be one or two people at Microsoft who are dense enough to believe that mindshare dominance is some kind of stable and enduring position. Maybe that even accounts for some of the weirdos they’ve hired in the pure business end of the operation, the zealots who keep getting hauled into court by enraged judges. But most of them must have the wit to understand that phenomena like these are maddeningly unstable, and that there’s no telling what weird, seemingly inconsequential event might cause the system to shift into a radically different configuration.

  To put it another way, Microsoft can be confident that Thomas Penfield Jackson will not hand down an order that the brains of everyone in the developed world are to be summarily reprogrammed. But there’s no way to predict when people will decide, en masse, to reprogram their own brains. This might explain some of Microsoft’s behavior, such as their policy of keeping eerily large reserves of cash sitting around, and the extreme anxiety that they display whenever something like Java comes along.

  I have never seen the inside of the building at Microsoft where the top executives hang out, but I have this fantasy that in the hallways, at regular intervals, big red alarm boxes are bolted to the wall. Each contains a large red button protected by a windowpane. A metal hammer dangles on a chain next to it. Above is a big sign reading: IN THE EVENT OF A CRASH IN MARKET SHARE, BREAK GLASS.

  What happens when someone shatters the glass and hits the button, I don’t know, but it sure would be interesting to find out. One imagines banks collapsing all over the world as Microsoft withdraws its cash reserves, and shrink-wrapped pallet-loads of hundred-dollar bills dropping from the skies. No doubt, Microsoft has a plan. But what I would really like to know is whether, at some level, their programmers might heave a big sigh of relief if the burden of writing the One Universal Interface to Everything were suddenly lifted from their shoulders.

  THE RIGHT PINKY OF GOD

  In his book The Life of the Cosmos, which everyone should read, Lee Smolin gives the best description I’ve ever read of how our universe emerged from an uncannily precise balancing of different fundamental constants. The mass of the proton, the strength of gravity, the range of the weak nuclear force, and a few dozen other fundamental constants completely determine what sort of universe will emerge from a Big Bang. If these values had been even slightly different, the universe would have been a vast ocean of tepid gas or a hot knot of plasma or some other basically uninteresting thing—a dud, in other words. The only way to get a universe that’s not a dud—that has stars, heavy elements, planets, and life—is to get the basic numbers just right. If there were some machine, somewhere, that could spit out universes with randomly chosen values for their fundamental constants, then for every universe like ours it would produce 10229 duds.

  Though I haven’t sat down and run the numbers on it, to me this seems comparable to the probability of making a Unix computer do something useful by logging into a tty and typing in command lines when you have forgotten all of the little options and keywords. Every time your right pinky slams that Enter key, you are making another try. In some cases the operating system does nothing. In other cases it wipes out all of your files. In most cases it just gives you an error message. In other words, you get many duds. But sometimes, if you have it all just right, the computer grinds away for a while and then produces something like emacs. It actually generates complexity, which is Smolin’s criterion for interestingness.

  Not only that, but it’s beginning to look as if, once you get below a certain size—way below the level of quarks, down into the realm of string theory
—the universe can’t be described very well by physics as it has been practiced since the days of Newton. If you look at a small enough scale, you see processes that look almost computational in nature.

  I think that the message is very clear here: somewhere outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system, coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge. The cosmic operating system uses a command line interface. It runs on something like a teletype, with lots of noise and heat; punched-out bits flutter down into its hopper like drifting stars. The demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command line after another, specifying the values of fundamental constants of physics:

  universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34

  -protonmass 1.673e-27….

  and when he’s finished typing out the command line, his right pinky hesitates above the enter key for an aeon or two, wondering what’s going to happen; then down it comes—and the whack you hear is another Big Bang.

  Now that is a cool operating system, and if such a thing were actually made available on the Internet (for free, of course), every hacker in the world would download it right away and then stay up all night long messing with it, spitting out universes right and left. Most of them would be pretty dull universes, but some of them would be simply amazing. Because what those hackers would be aiming for would be much more ambitious than a universe that had a few stars and galaxies in it. Any run-of-the-mill hacker would be able to do that. No, the way to gain a towering reputation on the Internet would be to get so good at tweaking your command line that your universes would spontaneously develop life. And once the way to do that became common knowledge, those hackers would move on, trying to make their universes develop the right kind of life, trying to find the one change in the nth decimal place of some physical constant that would give us an earth in which, say, Hitler had been accepted into art school after all.