Flashes of Panic

This weekend I finished Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning… Was the Command Line and picked up Linus Torvalds and David Diamond’s Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. It’s an interesting pairing, as good as the time I read Murray Halberg’s A Clean Pair of Heels right before Bob Schul’s In the Long Run.

The latter two names, for those who don’t know them, were the 5,000m Olympic gold medalists in 1960 and 1964, respectively. Stephenson is an author (most recently, The Confusion) and Torvalds… well, as the book explains, Torvalds wrote and still maintains authority over the operating system known as Linux.

Stephenson’s book is a tour of a few wild ideas. First, operating systems. Second, that you can put a string of bits on a disk and sell it, and somehow maintain its marketability in the face of free competition. Third… well, operating systems, and Stephenson hits four “major” ones, specifically the matched proprietary rivals MacOS and Windows, the free and powerful Linux, and BeOS. The book is already dated—MacOS has made massive leaps since it was written, and BeOS is defunct—but in the telescoped development of the computer world, it’s important to have some history to properly judge the present. Anyway, Stephenson isn’t completely wrapped in geek-speak; as in his excellent Cryptonomicon, he’s very good at taking representative elements of “hacker” culture and explaining them in a way that makes sense to non-geeks but doesn’t trivialize them. He compares today’s technical culture to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine with the below-ground Morlocks as a technical, book-reading minority running the technical show for the above ground Eloi, consumers of mass culture. He addresses the way different operating systems work in the wider organization of computer systems; how, for instance,

In trying to understand the Linux phenomenon, then, we have to look not to a single innovator but to a sort of bizarre Trinity: Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Bill Gates. Take away any of these three and Linux would not exist.

His main thesis is that the OS is a mediator between ourselves and the infinite complexity of the computer itself, and that the dominance of Windows is not because it’s better or because Microsoft is evil—it’s because American’s are looking for a mediated experience, looking for something Eloi can handle. And that Linux is the OS of the Morlocks. I’ve oversimplified this beyond belief, but it’s very, very interesting. (And it’s a free download from the website I’ve linked above, if you feel like paying for the paper and printing instead of buying a pre-printed version.)

Torvalds’ book is an interesting follow-up, because it reminds me how recently Linux became a viable OS. Its first release was around the time I was graduating from high school, and by the time I was out of college it was starting to run large servers. Now here I am administering three Linux servers and contemplating set-up of a Linux workstation here. (OK, maybe I am a little bored with being the only Morlock in the office.) It’s comic, self-effacing, and unapologetic; though Torvalds and Diamond clearly tried to keep the geek-speak to a minimum, they went over the head of their copyeditor at least twice that I’ve noticed (the ls command for getting a directory listing doesn’t include an apostrophe—what is an l's command?)

Still, Torvalds quotes one of his early postings about Linux: “Do you pine for the days when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?” He can actually make me excited about an idea like doing low-level system code. He describes the flash of feeling he got when the initial assembly-language terminal emulator which eventually became Linux 0.01 first began flashing letters on the screen, and I recognized it. Cool.

Geez. Book reviews, movie reviews. I’ll be doing restaurants soon. (This weekend was the Taste of Amherst. Mmmm, Indian.)

Now playing: This Dreadful Life from Cherry Marmalade by Kay Hanley