In the Beginning...Was the Command Line Read Online Free PDF

written by the programmers—can be kept secret. But an OS as a whole is a collection of small subroutines that do very specific, very clearly defined jobs. Exactly what those subroutines do has to be made public, quite explicitly and exactly, or else the OS is completely useless to programmers; they can’t make use of those subroutines if they don’t have a complete and perfect understanding of what the subroutines do.
    The only thing that isn’t made public is exactly how the subroutines do what they do. But once you know what a subroutine does, it’s generally quite easy (if you are a hacker) to write one of your own that does exactly the same thing. It might take a while, and it is tedious and unrewarding, but in most cases it’s not really hard.
    What’s hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not the writing; it’s deciding what to write. And the vendors of commercial OSes have already decided, and published their decisions.
    This has been generally understood for a long time. MS-DOS was duplicated, functionally, by a rival product, written from scratch, called ProDOS, that did all of the same things in pretty much the same way. In other words, another company was able to write code that did all of the same things as MS-DOS and sell it at a profit. If you are using the Linux OS, you can get a free program called WINE, which is a Windows emulator; that is, you can open up a window on your desktop that runs Windows programs. It means that a completely functional Windows OS has been recreated inside of Unix, like a ship in a bottle. And Unix itself, which is vastly more sophisticated than MS-DOS, has been built up from scratch many times over. Versions of it are sold by Sun, Hewlett-Packard, AT&T, Silicon Graphics, IBM, and others.
    People have, in other words, been rewriting basic OS code for so long that all of the technology that constituted an “operating system” in the traditional (pre-GUI) sense of that phrase is now so cheap and common thatit’s literally free. Not only could Gates and Allen not sell MS-DOS today, they could not even give it away, because much more powerful OSes are already being given away. Even the original Windows has become worthless, in that there is no point in owning something that can be emulated inside of Linux—which is, itself, free.
    In this way the OS business is very different from, say, the car business. Even an old rundown car has some value. You can use it for making runs to the dump, or strip it for parts. It is the fate of manufactured goods to slowly and gently depreciate as they get old and have to compete against more modern products.
    But it is the fate of operating systems to become free.
    Microsoft is a great software applications company. Applications—such as Microsoft Word—are an area where innovation brings real, direct, tangible benefits to users. The innovations might be new technology straight from the research department, or they might be in the category of bells and whistles, but in any event they are frequently useful and they seem to make users happy. And Microsoft is in the process of becoming a great research company. But Microsoft is not such a great operating systems company. This is not necessarily because their operating systems are all that bad from a purely technological standpoint. Microsoft’s OSes do have their problems, sure, but they are vastly better than they used to be, and they are adequate for most people.
    Why, then, do I say that Microsoft is not such a great operating systems company? Because the very nature ofoperating systems is such that it is senseless for them to be developed and owned by a specific company. It’s a thankless job to begin with. Applications create possibilities for millions of credulous users, whereas OSes impose limitations on thousands of grumpy coders, and so OS-makers will forever be on the shit-list of anyone who counts for anything in the high-tech world. Applications get used by people whose big problem