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Book: In the Beginning...Was the Command Line
Quotes of Book: In the Beginning...Was the
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  1. Neal Stephenson _ In the Beginning...Was the

    The other, somewhat subtler point, was that interface is very important. Sure, the MGB was a lousy car in almost every way that counted: balky, unreliable, underpowered. But it was fun to drive. It was responsive. Every pebble on the road was felt in the bones, every nuance in the pavement transmitted instantly to the driver's hands. He could listen to the engine and tell what was wrong with it. The steering responded immediately to commands from his hands. To us passengers it was a pointless exercise in going nowhere--about as interesting as peering over someone's shoulder while he punches numbers into a spreadsheet. But to the driver it was an experience. For a short time he was extending his body and his senses into a larger realm, and doing things that he couldn't do unassisted.
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  2. Neal Stephenson _ In the Beginning...Was the

    The cathedral as a whole is awesome and stirring in spite, and possibly because, of the fact that we have no idea who built it. When we walk through it, we are communing not with individual stone carvers but with an entire culture.
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  3. Neal Stephenson _ In the Beginning...Was the

    Lewis Carroll and J. M. Barrie were very strange men, and such is the nature of the written word that their personal strangeness shines straight through all the layers of Disneyfication like X-rays through a wall. Probably
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  4. Neal Stephenson _ In the Beginning...Was the

    The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire point of having a culture. I
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  5. Neal Stephenson _ In the Beginning...Was the

    Humans are conversant in many media {music, dance, painting}, but all of them are analog except for the written word, which is naturally expressed in digital form {i.e. it is a series of discrete symbols-every letter in every book is a member of a certain character set, every "a" is the same as every other "a," and so on}. As any communications engineer can tell you, digital signals are much better to work with than analog ones because they are easily copied, transmitted, and error-checked. Unlike analog signals, they are not doomed to degradation over time and distance. That
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  6. Neal Stephenson _ In the Beginning...Was the

    A string of ones and zeroes was not a difficult thing for Bill Gates to distribute, once he'd thought of the idea. The hard part was selling it-reassuring customers that they were actually getting something in return for their money. Anyone who has ever bought a piece of software in a store has had the curiously deflating experience of taking the bright shrink-wrapped box home, tearing it open, finding that it's ninety-five percent air, throwing away all the little cards, party favors, and bits of trash, and loading the disk into the computer. The end result {after you've lost the disk} is nothing except some images on a computer screen, and some capabilities that weren't there before. Sometimes you don't even have that-you have a string of error messages instead. But your money is definitely gone. Now we are almost accustomed to this, but twenty years ago it was a very dicey business proposition.
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  7. Neal Stephenson _ In the Beginning...Was the

    Apple has always insisted on having a hardware monopoly, except for a brief period in the mid-1990s when they allowed clone-makers to compete with them, before subsequently putting them out of business. Macintosh hardware was, consequently, expensive. You didn't open it up and fool around with it because doing so would void the warranty. In fact, the first Mac was specifically designed to be difficult to open-you needed a kit of exotic tools, which you could buy through little ads that began to appear in the back pages of magazines a few months after the Mac came out on the market. These ads always had a certain disreputable air about them, like pitches for lock-picking tools in the backs of lurid detective magazines.
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  8. Neal Stephenson _ In the Beginning...Was the

    GUIs tend to impose a large overhead on every single piece of software, even the smallest, and this overhead completely changes the programming environment. Small utility programs are no longer worth writing. Their functions, instead, tend to get swallowed up into omnibus software packages.
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  9. Neal Stephenson _ In the Beginning...Was the

    Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself-and more than just graphical. Let's call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.
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  10. Neal Stephenson _ In the Beginning...Was the

    Americans' preference for mediated experiences is obvious enough, and I'm not going to keep pounding it into the ground. I'm not even going to make snotty comments about it-after all, I was at Disney World as a paying customer. But it clearly relates to the colossal success of GUIs, and so I have to talk about it some. Disney does mediated experiences better than anyone. If they understood what OSes are, and why people use them, they could crush Microsoft in a year or two.
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  11. Neal Stephenson _ In the Beginning...Was the

    it comes out of the fact that during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.
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  12. Neal Stephenson _ In the Beginning...Was the

    Hacker with Bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"Prospective Station Wagon Buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music."Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks, we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!
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