The Morlock Market

UNIX is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly complied oral history of the hacker culture. It is our Gilgamesh epic. UNIX is known, loved and understood by so many hackers that it can be re-created from scratch whenever someone needs it. This is very difficult to understand for people who are accustomed to thinking of OSes as things that absolutely have to be created by a company and bought.

I've been reading and rereading In the Beginning Was the Command Line, a small book by Neal Stephenson who is better known as the best-selling author of the novels Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon (the full text is also widely available on the Web). In a general way, IBCL is about the real-world verities of command-line computing: its practical authenticities, its meritocratic culture, its best-tool-for-the-job approach to building and fixing stuff; and how much the GUI-using majority fails to comprehend even the existence of a better, more fundamental way to use (and not just “interact” with) computers.

But it's also about prophesy. There is an arc to Stephenson's story, one that ends where it began, with the command line. Command-line computing is not simple, he says. Nor is fixing a car or building a house. “Life is a very hard and complicated thing,” he concludes. “No interface can change that; and anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and if you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own.”

For the last fifteen years, the majority of the computing population has chosen to let Microsoft make their choices for them. Personally I believe Microsoft gets far too little credit for the many positive aspects of this. The fact that they turned extremely complicated processes and functions into moderately complicated but extremely appealing products is a marketing triumph of the highest order. Today it is no more possible to do business in the world without touching Microsoft products than it is to find transportation without internal combustion engines.

Worse, these products' frequent failures are legitimized by ubiquitous acquiescence. Jeff Rankin says, “Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.”

Stephenson isolates at least two Faustian reasons for this. One is humanity's fondness for mediated experiences. Witness the success of Disney, which “does mediated experience better than anyone,” Stephenson writes. “If they understand what OSes were, and why people use them, they could crush Microsoft in a year or two.” The other is that “we are way too busy, nowadays, to comprehend everything in detail. And it is better to comprehend it dimly, through an interface, than not at all.”

The key word is “everything”. Personal computing was born with ambitions that far exceeded its abilities. Because it could do just about anything, it should do just about anything. And, amazingly, there was more than sufficient demand for enough of “just about anything” to justify and attract venture funding for software start-ups by the multitude. But in the long run (which, again, hasn't really been very long), only one company seemed to understood exactly how much of everything could practically be handled by a PC, and how to minimize the inherent complications for the largest percentage of everybody. However awful Microsoft may have been in other ways, this comprehension alone is an achievement of Roman dimensions.

The cultural result is what Stephenson calls “a two-tiered system, like the Morlocks and the Eloi in H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, except that it has been turned upside down”. Here is his explanation:

To be fair, Stephenson goes on to credit the positive social effects of mediated experience:

The cultural distinctions are interesting but frankly not important. The real and important division is between makers and users. Let's divide the computing world into three classes and look at how the Morlocks and the Eloi sort out: The notion of a device that does everything is ludicrous in the embedded world, which is comprised of nothing but specialties. The embedded world also doesn't need fancy metaphors because nobody wants a button or a dial to do “whatever”, depending on which application is running. There is no “whatever” in the embedded world. If you're dialing a radio or regulating a valve, you're doing it on a device intended to do just that and not much more.

It turns out that Linux, by virtue of its small size, modular form, familiarity and open-source code, is ideal for an infinitude of single purposes. It's also exceedingly practical. This is why the Morlocks will soon be hacking away at everything that can conceivably benefit from Net-connected embedded intelligence. Since this includes a vast amount of stuff, we can expect the Morlock population to quickly grow in number, diversity and power. The result will be a revolution far more profound and important than personal computing.

For the suits among us, the most important question might be, How long before Linux, which manifests as practical specialization, makes personal computing as we know it obsolete? In other words, when will it be easier and faster to hack together (or buy, or both) a point-of-sale system that runs on Linux, rather than cope with a third-party package that has to run on crusty old Windows98? Or an accounting system that does accounting and little more, but connects to the rest of the world over TCP/IP and runs on reliable generic hardware?

Let's put it another way. How long before nobody gets fired for specifying Linux because too many of the suits are Morlocks?

Here's a good place to start: it's already that way at IBM.