- Home
- About
- Reviews
Archive by Date Authors: A to Z Titles: A to Z Animal Themed Books Childrens (all ages) Books for Older Children Children's Monster Books Children's Picture Books Children's Books: 12 - 24 months Fiction Graphic Novels and Manga LGBT Mysteries and Thrillers Non-Fiction Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Short Stories YA
- Blog
- 2012
- 2011
- 2010
- 2009
- 2008
- 2007
- 2006
- 2005
- 2004
- eBooks
- Wishlist
- Art
- Contact Me
- Subscribe by Email
Comments for In the Beginning... Was the Command Line
In the Beginning... Was the Command Line: 05/19/07
In the Beginning... was a RABCK to me from another BookCrosser. I had put it on my wishlist after enjoying Snowcrash and wanted to see what he'd have to say in a nonfiction book about computers. Stephenson's turn of phrase reminds me a bit of Scott Adams in both the good and the bad.
Overall I enjoyed the book but I was glad it was a short one. The chapters from his comparison of Disney World to the modern day operating system onward drag. These final essays are more rants than insights into the nature of computers and programming. I got rather tired about his wining about failed computers and his inability to install Windows NT after giving up on MacOS. What he fails to realize is that hardware failures are part and parcel of working with mobile machines (laptops). They will never be as stable as their desktop counterparts. Instead, though, he blames the OS.
The book also suffers from being out of date. BeOS is dead and MacOS is now a flavor of Unix. It also has a command line. New Macs also now run on Intel chips so his complaints against the Motorola chips are also moot. But in all fairness, the book was published in 1999 when Apple's future wasn't too bright.
books | bookcrossing | nonfiction | computers