Read Online In the Beginning...Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson - Free Book Online
Authors: Neal Stephenson
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really paying for, and is not especially interested in, the low-level code that allocates memory or writes bytes onto the disk. What we’re really buying is a system of metaphors. And—much more important—what we’re buying into is the underlying assumption that metaphors are a good way to deal with the world.
Recently a lot of new hardware has become available that gives computers numerous interesting ways of affecting the real world: making paper spew out of printers, causing words to appear on screens thousands of miles away, shooting beams of radiation through cancer patients, creating realistic moving pictures of the Titanic . Windows is now used as an OS for cash registers and bank tellers’ terminals. My satellite TV system uses a sort of GUI to change channels and show program guides. Modern cellular telephones have a crude GUI built into a tiny LCD screen. Even Legos now have a GUI: you can buy a Lego set called Mindstorms that enables you to build little Lego robots and program them through a GUI on your computer. So we are now asking the GUI to do a lot more than serve as a glorified typewriter. Now we want it to become a generalized tool for dealing with reality. This has become a bonanza for companies that make a living out of bringing new technology to the mass market.
Obviously you cannot sell a complicated technological system to people without some sort of interface that enables them to use it. The internal combustion engine was a technological marvel in its day, but useless as a consumer good until a clutch, transmission, steering wheel, and throttle were connected to it. That odd collection of gizmos, which survives to this day in every car on the road, made up what we would today call a user interface. But if cars had been invented after Macintoshes, carmakers would not have bothered to gin up all of these arcane devices. We would have a computer screen instead of a dashboard, and a mouse (or at best a joystick)instead of a steering wheel, and we’d shift gears by pulling down a menu:
PARK
REVERSE
NEUTRAL
3
2
1
Help…
A few lines of computer code can thus be made to substitute for any imaginable mechanical interface. The problem is that in many cases the substitute is a poor one. Driving a car through a GUI would be a miserable experience. Even if the GUI were perfectly bug-free, it would be incredibly dangerous, because menus and buttons simply can’t be as responsive as direct mechanical controls. My friend’s dad, the gentleman who was restoring the MGB, never would have bothered with it if it had been equipped with a GUI. It wouldn’t have been any fun.
The steering wheel and gearshift lever were invented during an era when the most complicated technology in most homes was a butter churn. Those early carmakers were simply lucky, in that they could dream up whateverinterface was best suited to the task of driving an automobile, and people would learn it. Likewise with the dial telephone and the AM radio. By the time of the Second World War, most people knew several interfaces: they could not only churn butter but also drive a car, dial a telephone, turn on a radio, summon flame from a cigarette lighter, and change a lightbulb.
But now every little thing—wristwatches, VCRs, stoves—is jammed with features, and every feature is useless without an interface. If you are like me, and like most other consumers, you have never used ninety percent of the available features on your microwave oven, VCR, or cell phone. You don’t even know that these features exist. The small benefit they might bring you is outweighed by the sheer hassle of having to learn about them. This has got to be a big problem for makers of consumer goods, because they can’t compete without offering features.
It’s no longer acceptable for engineers to invent a wholly novel user interface for every new product, as they did in the case of the automobile, partly because it’s too
Recently a lot of new hardware has become available that gives computers numerous interesting ways of affecting the real world: making paper spew out of printers, causing words to appear on screens thousands of miles away, shooting beams of radiation through cancer patients, creating realistic moving pictures of the Titanic . Windows is now used as an OS for cash registers and bank tellers’ terminals. My satellite TV system uses a sort of GUI to change channels and show program guides. Modern cellular telephones have a crude GUI built into a tiny LCD screen. Even Legos now have a GUI: you can buy a Lego set called Mindstorms that enables you to build little Lego robots and program them through a GUI on your computer. So we are now asking the GUI to do a lot more than serve as a glorified typewriter. Now we want it to become a generalized tool for dealing with reality. This has become a bonanza for companies that make a living out of bringing new technology to the mass market.
Obviously you cannot sell a complicated technological system to people without some sort of interface that enables them to use it. The internal combustion engine was a technological marvel in its day, but useless as a consumer good until a clutch, transmission, steering wheel, and throttle were connected to it. That odd collection of gizmos, which survives to this day in every car on the road, made up what we would today call a user interface. But if cars had been invented after Macintoshes, carmakers would not have bothered to gin up all of these arcane devices. We would have a computer screen instead of a dashboard, and a mouse (or at best a joystick)instead of a steering wheel, and we’d shift gears by pulling down a menu:
PARK
REVERSE
NEUTRAL
3
2
1
Help…
A few lines of computer code can thus be made to substitute for any imaginable mechanical interface. The problem is that in many cases the substitute is a poor one. Driving a car through a GUI would be a miserable experience. Even if the GUI were perfectly bug-free, it would be incredibly dangerous, because menus and buttons simply can’t be as responsive as direct mechanical controls. My friend’s dad, the gentleman who was restoring the MGB, never would have bothered with it if it had been equipped with a GUI. It wouldn’t have been any fun.
The steering wheel and gearshift lever were invented during an era when the most complicated technology in most homes was a butter churn. Those early carmakers were simply lucky, in that they could dream up whateverinterface was best suited to the task of driving an automobile, and people would learn it. Likewise with the dial telephone and the AM radio. By the time of the Second World War, most people knew several interfaces: they could not only churn butter but also drive a car, dial a telephone, turn on a radio, summon flame from a cigarette lighter, and change a lightbulb.
But now every little thing—wristwatches, VCRs, stoves—is jammed with features, and every feature is useless without an interface. If you are like me, and like most other consumers, you have never used ninety percent of the available features on your microwave oven, VCR, or cell phone. You don’t even know that these features exist. The small benefit they might bring you is outweighed by the sheer hassle of having to learn about them. This has got to be a big problem for makers of consumer goods, because they can’t compete without offering features.
It’s no longer acceptable for engineers to invent a wholly novel user interface for every new product, as they did in the case of the automobile, partly because it’s too
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