In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

This essay by Neal Stephenson was first published in 1999. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_... The analogy of OS as cars (Windows is a station wagon, Linux is a tank) is brought up in the recent Acquired episode on Microsoft, where Vista was a Dodge Viper but Windows 7 was a Toyota Camry, which is what users actually wanted.

Is this the origin of the classic analogy that Windows is a station wagon, Mac OS is a European luxury sedan, and Linux is a free tank? I had no idea that the author Neal Stephenson came up with that. The analogy is definitely a bit outdated now, what with Windows 8 then 10 then 11 getting aggressively less user-friendly each year.

"In other words, the first thing that Apple's hackers had done when they'd got the MacOS up and running--probably even before they'd gotten it up and running--was to re-create the Unix interface, so that they would be able to get some useful work done. At the time, I simply couldn't get my mind around this, but: as far as Apple's hackers were concerned, the Mac's vaunted Graphical User Interface was an impediment, something to be circumvented before the little toaster…

Reproducing an ooold comment from elsewhere https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/hwnm/unix_the_... : The real problem with Stevenson's account is that the command line is no more the True Reality Behind Appearances than the GUI is; it's just another shadow on the cave wall. (Especially on Unix, where the shell is just another user-space program.) Eben Moglen identified the problem with the GUI (as we know it) http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/1/i_moglen_1.php more precisely: > What I saw in the Xerox…