In this essay, Neal Stephenson shares his personal history of computer operating systems and his views on the culture of their creators and users. His journey begins with a programming course at high school where he has to prepare the program in advance, type it into a tape puncher, feed the tape to a modem that transfers it to the university mainframe across town, and finally receive the result as a print-out.

His love affair with the Mac starts in 1984 and introduces him to graphical user interfaces, which would become his primary way to interact with computers until 1995, when his PowerBook destroys a big important file, and he turns to Debian Linux instead.

With Linux, he rediscovers the command line interface, and is also impressed by the concept of free software, especially how everyone can take a good look at all the components, and how openly bugs and problems are being discussed, which leads to issues being resolved very timely and transparently. Stephenson contrasts the Debian bug database to Microsoft and Apple's support model, where bugs cannot be publicly disclosed as it could impact sales, and users have to rely on updates and procedures without understanding what those really do.

At the time of writing, in 1999, he has moved on to BeOS, which he praises as an ideal combination of shiny interface and the power of command line and GNU tools. Interestingly, even though BeOS has disappeared in the meantime and Stephenson (at least according to a 2004 Slashdot interview) has now embraced OS X, the book does not seem outdated. It is still full of valid remarks and an entertaining read.

I am just wondering whether the comments about popular culture would have been different if the book was written after 2001. He describes the American public as ignorant masses who lead their lives in a unified amorphous culture by means of a graphical user interface (TV, Disneyland), whereas the small elite that controls them knows how to use the command line interface (books, laws) and tries to preserve their separate culture, how all this is maybe not a bad thing as it keeps people peaceful, and how this lack of culture and the drive to export it explains that members of older, richer cultures (such as France or the Islam) sometimes get so irritated about their sons coming home wearing Chicago Bulls caps with the bills turned sideways that they sometimes pop in places like Luxor and begin pumping bullets into Westerners.