New releases of operating systems are launched as if they were Hollywood blockbusters, with celebrity endorsements, talk show appearances, and world tours. Yet now the company that Gates and Allen founded is selling operating systems like Gillette sells razor blades. Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating system was were apt to think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder reactor or a U-2 spy plane, and not something that could ever be (in the parlance of high-tech) “productized.” The product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeroes. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. This was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. The business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. “In the Beginning was the Command Line” by Neal StephensonĪbout twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines for use in the home.
In the Beginning Was the Command Line, Neal Stephenson
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