Open and closed operating systems
I’ve been reading a really interesting article by Neal Stephenson called In The Beginning Was The Command Line. It was published in 1999, so some of the conclusions are a little dated, but it is certainly worth a read. Neal longs for an OS with a nice GUI, multi-threading, and a terminal window to interact with Unix command line applicationsâlike BeOS, but not doomed to obscurity. I think that MacOSX has filled that role fairly well, but many of the other points he makes about interacting and tinkering with the innards of the system are well made.
