Re:The -a to -z of Command-Line Options (2003)
by rconti on Monday December 10, 2018 @12:35PM
(#18649562)
Wow, the fact that this is baffling to someone is, in turn, baffling to me! I don't mean this to be insulting, it's just one of those generational things. It hadn't occurred to me that someone (someone who cares about CLIs, at least) wouldn't know this.
It might be informative to step back and point out that this is why so many of "us" originally disliked Macs; before the "walled garden" of iOS, before even the walled garden of needing iTunes to load music onto your iPod, there was the GUI-only MacOS. Now, those in the know could dramatically alter Mac OS with Resedit, but I wasn't a "Mac guy", so I never really knew anything about it; I hated a locked down OS that only let you do things you could click on.
It was such a step forward to many of us hobbyists that OS X was based on Unix, and suddenly we had the best of both worlds -- a good GUI and a good CLI. Suddenly Windows was no longer the commercial OS that let you "do whatever you wanted" with it (relatively speaking).
In fact, (to personalize this for a paragraph), as a Linux desktop person buying his first laptop in 2002, I decided "well, I guess I might as well buy a Windows laptop instead of trying to hassle with running Linux on it." It felt like "giving in" to buy the commercial OS just to have easy access to Office and DVD players and the like. It slowly dawned on me "wait, if I'm going to buy a commercial OS, maybe I could buy a Mac?" I had never considered a Mac in my life, but I realized, wait, I can have Office on it (which not everyone realized, even then), AND easily play DVDs, AND this new OS X thing (which had come out a year before). It was a huge leap of faith, though.
The reputation of Apple building things that are just "pretty and shiny", I think, still stems from this sense that it's a consumer device that only does what Apple lets you do with it. And yes, some of these criticisms are still valid, but for those who weren't aware of the no-CLI Mac OS, I think it's very useful context that many of us take for granted.
It might be informative to step back and point out that this is why so many of "us" originally disliked Macs; before the "walled garden" of iOS, before even the walled garden of needing iTunes to load music onto your iPod, there was the GUI-only MacOS. Now, those in the know could dramatically alter Mac OS with Resedit, but I wasn't a "Mac guy", so I never really knew anything about it; I hated a locked down OS that only let you do things you could click on.
It was such a step forward to many of us hobbyists that OS X was based on Unix, and suddenly we had the best of both worlds -- a good GUI and a good CLI. Suddenly Windows was no longer the commercial OS that let you "do whatever you wanted" with it (relatively speaking).
In fact, (to personalize this for a paragraph), as a Linux desktop person buying his first laptop in 2002, I decided "well, I guess I might as well buy a Windows laptop instead of trying to hassle with running Linux on it." It felt like "giving in" to buy the commercial OS just to have easy access to Office and DVD players and the like. It slowly dawned on me "wait, if I'm going to buy a commercial OS, maybe I could buy a Mac?" I had never considered a Mac in my life, but I realized, wait, I can have Office on it (which not everyone realized, even then), AND easily play DVDs, AND this new OS X thing (which had come out a year before). It was a huge leap of faith, though.
The reputation of Apple building things that are just "pretty and shiny", I think, still stems from this sense that it's a consumer device that only does what Apple lets you do with it. And yes, some of these criticisms are still valid, but for those who weren't aware of the no-CLI Mac OS, I think it's very useful context that many of us take for granted.