Re: <nettime> // Critical Engineering Summer Intensives 2017 //

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

It was always there, but I guess it's hard to attract attention to 
something that's not 'growing' :)

...
In the Beginning was the Command Line
by Neal Stephenson  1999

About 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. The business took off, and its founders made a lot 
of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring 
visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up 
with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer 
operating systems. This was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and 
Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It 
came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights 
blink. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It 
arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more 
than the box that the OS came in. 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. 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 rest is at

http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
or
http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html
or
http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.shtml



> This 1-day intensive workshop introduces participants to the UNIX
> command line, a rapidly growing and ubiquitous interface common to every
> computer from the UNIX family of operating systems - whether web-server,
> Internet appliance, wireless router, autonomous robot, Raspberry Pi, OS
> X or Linux laptop.
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