In the Beginning...Was the Command Line (11 page)

The only real question about BeOS is whether or not it is doomed.

Of late, Be has responded to the tiresome accusation that they are doomed with the assertion that BeOS is “a media operating system” made for media content creators, and hence is not really in competition with Microsoft Windows at all. This is a little bit disingenuous. To go back to the car dealership analogy, it is like the Batmobile dealer claiming that he is not really in competition with the others because his car can go three times as fast as theirs and is also capable of flying.

Be has an office in Paris and, as mentioned, the conversation on Be mailing lists has a strongly European flavor. At the same time they have made strenuous efforts to find a niche in Japan, and Hitachi has recently begun bundling BeOS with their PCs. So if I had to make a wild guess, I’d say that they are playing Go while Microsoft is playing chess. They are staying clear, for now, of Microsoft’s overwhelmingly strong position in North America. They are trying to get themselves established around the
edges of the board, as it were, in Europe and Japan, where people may be more open to alternative OSes, or at least more hostile to Microsoft, than they are in the United States.

What holds Be back in this country is that the smart people are afraid to look like suckers. You run the risk of looking naive when you say, “I’ve tried the BeOS and here’s what I think of it.” It seems much more sophisticated to say, “Be’s chances of carving out a new niche in the highly competitive OS market are close to nil.”

It is, in techno-speak, a problem of mindshare. And in the OS business, mindshare is more than just a PR issue; it has direct effects on the technology itself. All of the peripheral gizmos that can be hung off of a personal computer—the printers, scanners, PalmPilot interfaces, and Lego Mindstorms—require pieces of software called drivers. Likewise, video cards and (to a lesser extent) monitors need drivers. Even the different types of motherboards on the market relate to the OS in different ways, and separate code is required for each one. All of this hardware-specific code must not only be written but also tested, debugged, upgraded, maintained, and supported. Because the hardware market has become so vast and complicated, what really determines an OS’s fate is not how good the OS is technically, or how much it costs, but rather the availability of hardware-specific code. Linux hackers have to write that code themselves, and they have done an amazingly good job of keeping up to speed. Be, Inc. has to write all their own drivers; though as BeOS has begun gathering momentum, third
party developers have begun to contribute drivers, which are available on Be’s website.

But Microsoft owns the high ground at the moment, because it doesn’t have to write its own drivers. Any hardware maker bringing a new video card or peripheral device to market today knows that it will be unsalable unless it comes with the hardware-specific code that will make it work under Windows, and so each hardware maker has accepted the burden of creating and maintaining its own library of drivers.

The U.S. government’s assertion that Microsoft has a monopoly in the OS market might be the most patently absurd claim ever advanced by the legal mind. Linux, a technically superior operating system, is being given away for free, and BeOS is available at a nominal price. This is simply a fact, which has to be accepted whether or not you like Microsoft. Microsoft is really big and rich, and if some of the government’s witnesses are to be believed, they are not nice guys. But the accusation of a monopoly simply does not make any sense.

What is really going on is that Microsoft has seized, for the time being, a certain type of high ground: they dominate in the competition for mindshare, and so any hardware or software maker who wants to be taken seriously feels compelled to make a product that is compatible with their operating systems. Since Windows-compatible drivers get written by the hardware makers, Microsoft doesn’t have to write them; in effect, the hardware makers are adding new components to Windows, making it a more capable OS, without charging Microsoft for the
service. It is a very good position to be in. The only way to fight such an opponent is to have an army of highly competetent coders who write and distribute equivalent drivers, which Linux does.

But possession of this psychological high ground is different from a monopoly in any normal sense of that word, because here the dominance has nothing to do with technical performance or price. The old robber-baron monopolies were monopolies because they physically controlled means of production and/or distribution. But in the software business, the means of production is hackers typing code, and the means of distribution is the Internet, and no one is claiming that Microsoft controls those.

Here, instead, the dominance is inside the minds of people who buy software. Microsoft has power because people believe it does. This power is very real. It makes lots of money. Judging from recent legal proceedings in both Washingtons, it would appear that this power and this money have inspired some very peculiar executives to come out and work for Microsoft, and that Bill Gates should have administered saliva tests to some of them before issuing them Microsoft ID cards.

But this is not the sort of power that fits any normal definition of the word “monopoly,” and it’s not amenable to a legal fix. The courts may order Microsoft to do things differently. They might even split the company up. But they can’t really do anything about a mindshare monopoly, short of taking every man, woman, and child
in the developed world and subjecting them to a lengthy brainwashing procedure.

Mindshare dominance is, in other words, a really odd sort of beast, something that the framers of our antitrust laws couldn’t possibly have imagined. It looks like one of these modern, wacky chaos-theory phenomena, a complexity thing, in which a whole lot of independent but connected entities (the world’s computer users), making decisions on their own, according to a few simple rules of thumb, generate a large phenomenon (total domination of the market by one company) that cannot be made sense of through any kind of rational analysis. Such phenomena are fraught with concealed tipping-points and all a-tangle with bizarre feedback loops, and cannot be understood; people who try, end up going crazy, forming crackpot theories, or becoming high-paid chaos-theory consultants.

Now, there might be one or two people at Microsoft who are dense enough to believe that mindshare dominance is some kind of stable and enduring position. Maybe that even accounts for some of the weirdos they’ve hired in the pure business end of the operation, the zealots who keep getting hauled into court by enraged judges. But most of them must have the wit to understand that phenomena like these are maddeningly unstable, and that there’s no telling what weird, seemingly inconsequential event might cause the system to shift into a radically different configuration.

To put it another way, Microsoft can be confident that Thomas Penfield Jackson will not hand down an order
that the brains of everyone in the developed world are to be summarily reprogrammed. But there’s no way to predict when people will decide, en masse, to reprogram their own brains. This might explain some of Microsoft’s behavior, such as their policy of keeping eerily large reserves of cash sitting around, and the extreme anxiety that they display whenever something like Java comes along.

I have never seen the inside of the building at Microsoft where the top executives hang out, but I have this fantasy that in the hallways, at regular intervals, big red alarm boxes are bolted to the wall. Each contains a large red button protected by a windowpane. A metal hammer dangles on a chain next to it. Above is a big sign reading:
IN THE EVENT OF A CRASH IN MARKET SHARE, BREAK GLASS
.

What happens when someone shatters the glass and hits the button, I don’t know, but it sure would be interesting to find out. One imagines banks collapsing all over the world as Microsoft withdraws its cash reserves, and shrink-wrapped pallet-loads of hundred-dollar bills dropping from the skies. No doubt, Microsoft has a plan. But what I would really like to know is whether, at some level, their programmers might heave a big sigh of relief if the burden of writing the One Universal Interface to Everything were suddenly lifted from their shoulders.

In his book
The Life of the Cosmos
, which everyone should read, Lee Smolin gives the best description I’ve ever read of how our universe emerged from an uncannily precise balancing of different fundamental constants. The mass of the proton, the strength of gravity, the range of the weak nuclear force, and a few dozen other fundamental constants completely determine what sort of universe will emerge from a Big Bang. If these values had been even slightly different, the universe would have been a vast ocean of tepid gas or a hot knot of plasma or some other basically uninteresting thing—a dud, in other words. The only way to get a universe that’s not a dud—that has stars, heavy elements, planets, and life—is to get the basic numbers just right. If there were some machine, somewhere, that could spit out universes with randomly chosen values for their fundamental constants, then for every universe like ours it would produce 10
²²⁹
duds.

Though I haven’t sat down and run the numbers on it, to me this seems comparable to the probability of mak
ing a Unix computer do something useful by logging into a tty and typing in command lines when you have forgotten all of the little options and keywords. Every time your right pinky slams that Enter key, you are making another try. In some cases the operating system does nothing. In other cases it wipes out all of your files. In most cases it just gives you an error message. In other words, you get many duds. But sometimes, if you have it all just right, the computer grinds away for a while and then produces something like emacs. It actually generates complexity, which is Smolin’s criterion for interestingness.

Not only that, but it’s beginning to look as if, once you get below a certain size—way below the level of quarks, down into the realm of string theory—the universe can’t be described very well by physics as it has been practiced since the days of Newton. If you look at a small enough scale, you see processes that look almost computational in nature.

I think that the message is very clear here: somewhere outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system, coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge. The cosmic operating system uses a command line interface. It runs on something like a teletype, with lots of noise and heat; punched-out bits flutter down into its hopper like drifting stars. The demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command line after another, specifying the values of fundamental constants of physics:

universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34

-protonmass 1.673e-27….

and when he’s finished typing out the command line, his right pinky hesitates above the enter key for an aeon or two, wondering what’s going to happen; then down it comes—and the
whack
you hear is another Big Bang.

Now
that
is a cool operating system, and if such a thing were actually made available on the Internet (for free, of course), every hacker in the world would download it right away and then stay up all night long messing with it, spitting out universes right and left. Most of them would be pretty dull universes, but some of them would be simply amazing. Because what those hackers would be aiming for would be much more ambitious than a universe that had a few stars and galaxies in it. Any run-of-the-mill hacker would be able to do that. No, the way to gain a towering reputation on the Internet would be to get so good at tweaking your command line that your universes would spontaneously develop life. And once the way to do that became common knowledge, those hackers would move on, trying to make their universes develop the right kind of life, trying to find the one change in the nth decimal place of some physical constant that would give us an earth in which, say, Hitler had been accepted into art school after all.

Even if that fantasy came true, though, most users (including myself, on certain days) wouldn’t want to bother learning to use all of those arcane commands and struggling with all of the failures; a few dud universes can
really clutter up your basement. After we’d spent a while pounding out command lines and hitting that enter key and spawning dull, failed universes, we would start to long for an OS that would go all the way to the opposite extreme: an OS that had the power to do everything—to live our life for us. In this OS, all of the possible decisions we could ever want to make would have been anticipated by clever programmers and condensed into a series of dialog boxes. By clicking on radio buttons we could choose from among mutually exclusive choices (
HETEROSEXUAL/HOMOSEXUAL
). Columns of check boxes would enable us to select the things that we wanted in our life (
GET MARRIED/WRITE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL
) and for more complicated options we could fill in little text boxes (
NUMBER OF DAUGHTERS/NUMBER OF SONS:
).

Even this user interface would begin to look awfully complicated after a while, with so many choices and so many hidden interactions between choices. It could become damn near unmanageable—the blinking twelve problem all over again. The people who brought us this operating system would have to provide templates and wizards, giving us a few default lives that we could use as starting places for designing our own. Chances are that these default lives would actually look pretty good to most people, good enough, anyway, that they’d be reluctant to tear them open and mess around with them for fear of making them worse. So after a few releases, the software would begin to look even simpler: you would boot it up and it would present you with a dialog box with a single large button in the middle labeled:
LIVE
. Once you had clicked that button, your life would begin. If anything got out of whack, or failed to meet your expectations, you could complain about it to Microsoft’s Customer Support Department. If you got a flack on the line, he or she would tell you that your life was actually fine, that there was not a thing wrong with it, and in any event it would be a lot better after the next upgrade was rolled out. But if you persisted, and identified yourself as advanced, you might get through to an actual engineer.

What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem and enumerated all of the dissatisfactions in your life? He would probably tell you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don’t like having choices made for you, you should start making your own.