24 December 2016

Book Log 2016 #26: In the Beginning... Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson

This article/blogpost/short book about looks at computer operating systems, comparing proprietary software (like Windows) to free software (like UNIX and its progeny) and positing that the for-pay systems would eventually fall by the wayside.

That didn't happen, and in some ways reality unfolded in an almost exact opposite way, with Windows continuing to be ubiquitous and Mac OS X combining GUI with a UNIX-based backing (Stephenson himself became an OS X user, and admits that most of this article is now obsolete).

All of that being said, it's an interesting piece of writing and worth reading to get a taste of computing at the time.

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