But now every little thing—wristwatches, VCRs, stoves—is jammed with features, and every feature is useless without an interface. If you are like me, and like most other consumers, you have never used ninety percent of the available features on your microwave oven, VCR, or cell phone. You don’t even know that these features exist. The small benefit they might bring you is outweighed by the sheer hassle of having to learn about them. This has got to be a big problem for makers of consumer goods, because they can’t compete without offering features.
It’s no longer acceptable for engineers to invent a wholly novel user interface for every new product, as they did in the case of the automobile, partly because it’s too expensive and partly because ordinary people can only learn so much. If the VCR had been invented a hundred years ago, it would have come with a thumb-wheel to adjust the tracking and a gearshift to change between forward and reverse, and a big cast-iron handle to load or to eject the cassettes. It would have had a big analog clock on the front of it, and you would have set the time by moving the hands around on the dial. But because the VCR was invented when it was—during a sort of awkward transitional period between the era of mechanical interfaces and GUIs—it just had a bunch of pushbuttons on the front, and in order to set the time you had to push the buttons in just the right way. This must have seemed reasonable enough to the engineers responsible for it, but to many users it was simply impossible. Thus the famous blinking 12:00 that appears on so many VCRs. Computer people call this “the blinking twelve problem.” When they talk about it, though, they usually aren’t talking about VCRs.
Modern VCRs usually have some kind of on-screen programming, which means that you can set the time and control other features through a sort of primitive GUI. GUIs have virtual pushbuttons too, of course, but they also have other types of virtual controls, like radio buttons, checkboxes, text entry boxes, dials, and scrollbars. Interfaces made out of these components seem to be a lot easier, for many people, than pushing those little buttons on the front of the machine, and so the blinking 12:00 itself is slowly disappearing from America’s living rooms. The blinking twelve problem has moved on to plague other technologies.
So the GUI has gone beyond being an interface to personal computers, and has become a sort of meta-interface that is pressed into service for every new piece of consumer technology. It is rarely an ideal fit, but having an ideal, or even a good, interface is no longer the priority; the important thing now is having some kind of interface that customers will actually use, so that manufacturers can claim, with a straight face, that they are offering new features.
We want GUIs largely because they are convenient and because they are easy—or at least the GUI makes it seem that way. Of course, nothing is really easy and simple, and putting a nice interface on top of it does not change that fact. A car controlled through a GUI would be easier to drive than one controlled through pedals and steering wheel, but it would be incredibly dangerous.
By using GUIs all the time we have insensibly bought into a premise that few people would have accepted if it were presented to them bluntly: namely, that hard things can be made easy, and complicated things simple, by putting the right interface on them. In order to understand how bizarre this is, imagine that book reviews were written according to the same values system that we apply to user interfaces: “The writing in this book is marvelously simple-minded and glib; the author glosses over complicated subjects and employs facile generalizations in almost every sentence. Readers rarely have to think, and are spared all of the difficulty and tedium typically involved in reading old-fashioned books.” As long as we stick to simple operations like setting the clocks on our VCRs, this is not so bad. But as we try to do more ambitious things with our technologies, we inevitably run into the problem of:
METAPHOR SHEAR
I began using Microsoft Word as soon as the first version was released around 1985. After some initial hassles I found it to be a better tool than its competition. I wrote a lot of stuff in early versions of Word, storing it all on floppies, and transferred the contents of all my floppies to my first hard drive, which I acquired around 1987. As new versions of Word came out, I faithfully upgraded, reasoning that as a writer it made sense for me to spend a certain amount of money on tools.
Sometime in the mid-1990s I attempted to open one of my old, circa-1985 Word documents using the version of Word then current: 6.0. It didn’t work. Word 6.0 did not recognize a document created by an earlier version of itself. By opening it as a text file, I was able to recover the sequences of letters that made up the text of the document. My words were still there. But the formatting had been run through a log chipper—the words I’d written were interrupted by spates of empty rectangular boxes and gibberish.
Now, in the context of a business (the chief market for Word) this sort of thing is only an annoyance—one of the routine hassles that go along with using computers. It’s easy to buy little file converter programs that will take care of this problem. But if you are a writer whose career is words, whose professional identity is a corpus of written documents, this kind of thing is extremely disquieting. There are very few fixed assumptions in my line of work, but one of them is that once you have written a word, it is written, and cannot be unwritten. The ink stains the paper, the chisel cuts the stone, the stylus marks the clay, and something has irrevocably happened. (My brother-in-law is a theologian who reads 3250-year-old cuneiform tablets—he can recognize the handwriting of particular scribes and identify them by name.) But word-processing software—particularly the sort that employs special, complex file formats—has the eldritch power to unwrite things. A small change in file formats, or a few twiddled bits, and months’ or years’ literary output can cease to exist.
Now this was technically a fault in the application (Word 6.0 for the Macintosh) not the operating system (MacOS 7.-something) and so the initial target of my annoyance was the people who were responsible for Word. But. On the other hand, I could have chosen the “Save as Text” option in Word and saved all of my documents as simple “telegrams,” and this problem would not have arisen. Instead I had allowed myself to be seduced by all of those flashy formatting options that hadn’t even existed until GUIs had come along to make them practicable. I had gotten into the habit of using them to make my documents look pretty (perhaps prettier than they deserved to look; all of the old documents on those floppies turned out to be more or less crap). Now I was paying the price for that self-indulgence. Technology had moved on and found ways to make my documents look even prettier, and the consequence of it was that all old ugly documents had ceased to exist.
It was—if you’ll pardon me for a moment’s strange little fantasy—as if I’d gone to stay at some resort, some exquisitely designed and art-directed hotel, placing myself in the hands of past masters of the Sensorial Interface, and had sat down in my room and written a story in ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad, and when I returned from dinner, discovered that the maid had taken my work away and left behind in its place a quill pen and a stack of fine parchment—explaining that the room looked ever so much finer this way, and it was all part of a routine upgrade. But written on these sheets of paper, in flawless penmanship, were long sequences of words chosen at random from the dictionary. Appalling, sure, but I couldn’t really lodge a complaint with the management, because by staying at this resort I had given my consent to it. I had surrendered my Morlock credentials and become an Eloi.
LINUX
During the late 1980s and early 1990s I spent a lot of time programming Macintoshes, and eventually decided to fork over several hundred dollars for an Apple product called the Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop, or MPW. MPW had competitors, but it was unquestionably the premier software development system for the Mac. It was what Apple’s own engineers used to write Macintosh code. Given that MacOS was far more technologically advanced, at the time, than its competition, and that Linux did not even exist yet, and given that this was the actual program
used by Apple’s world-class team of creative engineers, I had high expectations. It arrived on a stack of floppy disks about a foot high, and so there was plenty of time for my excitement to build during the endless installation process. The first time I launched MPW, I was probably expecting some kind of touchy-feely multimedia showcase. Instead it was austere, almost to the point of being intimidating. It was a scrolling window into which you could type simple, unformatted text. The system would then interpret these lines of text as commands and try to execute them.
It was, in other words, a glass teletype running a command line interface. It came with all sorts of cryptic but powerful commands, which could be invoked by typing their names, and which I learned to use only gradually. It was not until a few years later, when I began messing around with Unix, that I understood that the command line interface embodied in MPW was a re-creation of Unix.
The first thing that Apple’s hackers had done when they’d gotten the MacOS up and running—probably even before they’d gotten it up and running—was to recreate the Unix interface, so that they would be able to get some useful work done. At the time, I simply couldn’t get my mind around this, but, apparently as far as Apple’s hackers were concerned, the Mac’s vaunted graphical user interface was an impediment, something to be circumvented before the little toaster even came out onto the market.
Even before my PowerBook crashed and obliterated my big file in July 1995, there had been danger signs. An old college buddy of mine, who starts and runs high-tech companies in Boston, had developed a commercial product using Macintoshes as the front end. Basically the Macs were high-performance graphics terminals, chosen for their sweet user interface, giving users access to a large database of graphical information stored on a network of much more powerful, but less user-friendly, computers. This fellow was the second person who turned me on to Macintoshes, by the way, and through the mid-1980s we had shared the thrill of being hightech cognoscenti, using superior Apple technology in a world of DOS-using knuckleheads. Early versions of my friend’s system had worked well, he told me, but when several machines joined the network, mysterious crashes began to occur; sometimes the whole network would just freeze. It was one of those bugs that could not be reproduced easily. Finally they figured out that these network crashes were triggered whenever a user, scanning the menus for a particular item, held down the mouse button for more than a couple of seconds.
Fundamentally, the MacOS could only do one thing at a time. Drawing a menu on the screen is one thing. So when a menu was pulled down, the Macintosh was not capable of doing anything else until that indecisive user released the button.
This is not such a bad thing in a single-user, single-process machine (although it’s a fairly bad thing), but it’s no good in a machine that is on a network, because being on a network implies some kind of continual low-level interaction with other machines. By failing to respond to the network, the Mac caused a network-wide crash.
In order to work with other computers, and with networks, and with various different types of hardware, an OS must be incomparably more complicated and powerful than either MS-DOS or the original MacOS. The only way of connecting to the Internet that’s worth taking seriously is PPP, the Point-to-Point Protocol, which (never mind the details) makes your computer—temporarily—a full-fledged member of the global Internet, with its own unique address, and various privileges, powers, and responsibilities appertaining thereunto. Technically it means your machine is running the TCP/IP protocol, which, to make a long story short, revolves around sending packets of data back and forth, in no particular order, and at unpredictable times, according to a clever and elegant set of rules.
But sending a packet of data is one thing, and so an OS that can only do one thing at a time cannot simultaneously be part of the Internet and do anything else. When TCP/IP was invented, running it was an honor reserved for Serious Computers—mainframes and high-powered minicomputers used in technical and commercial settings—and so the protocol is engineered around the assumption that every computer using it is a serious machine, capable of doing many things at once. Not to put too fine a point on it, a Unix machine. Neither MacOS nor MS-DOS was originally built with that in mind, and so when the Internet got hot, radical changes had to be made.
When my PowerBook broke my heart, and when Word stopped recognizing my old files, I jumped to Unix. The obvious alternative to MacOS would have been Windows. I didn’t really have anything against Microsoft or Windows. But it was pretty obvious, now, that old PC operating systems were overreaching and showing the strain and, perhaps, were best avoided until they had learned to walk and chew gum at the same time.
The changeover took place on a particular day in the summer of 1995. I had been in San Francisco for a couple of weeks, using my PowerBook to work on a document. The document was too big to fit onto a single floppy, and so I hadn’t made a backup since leaving home. The PowerBook crashed and wiped out the entire file.
It happened just as I was on my way out the door to visit a company called Electric Communities, which in those days was in Los Altos. I took my PowerBook with me. My friends at Electric Communities were Mac users who had all sorts of utility software for unerasing files and recovering from disk crashes, and I was certain I could get most of the file back.
As it turned out, two different Mac crash recovery utilities were unable to find any trace that my file had ever existed. It was completely and systematically wiped out. We went through that hard disk block by block and found disjointed fragments of countless old, discarded, forgotten files, but none of what I wanted. The metaphor shear was especially brutal that day. It was sort of like watching the girl you’ve been in love with for ten years get killed in a car wreck, then attending her autopsy, and learning that underneath the clothes and makeup she was just flesh and blood.
I must have been reeling around the offices of Electric Communities in some kind of primal Jungian fugue, because at this moment three weirdly synchronistic things happened.
(1) Randy Farmer, a cofounder of the company, came in for a quick visit along with his family—he was recovering from back surgery at the time. He had some hot gossip: “Windows 95 mastered today.” What this meant was that Microsoft’s new operating system had, on this day, been placed on a special compact disk known as a golden master, which would be used to stamp out a jintillion copies in preparation for its thunderous release a few weeks later. This news was received peevishly by the staff of Electric Communities, including one whose office door was plastered with the usual assortment of cartoons and novelties, e.g.:
(2) A copy of a Dilbert cartoon in which Dilbert, the long-suffering corporate software engineer, encounters a portly, bearded, hairy man of a certain age—a bit like Santa Claus, but darker, with a certain edge about him. Dilbert recognizes this man, based upon his appearance and affect, as a Unix hacker, and reacts with a certain mixture of nervousness, awe, and hostility. Dilbert jabs weakly at the disturbing interloper for a couple of frames; the Unix hacker listens with a kind of infuriating, beatific calm, then, in the last frame, reaches into his pocket. “Here’s a nickel, kid,” he says, “go buy yourself a real computer.”
(3) The owner of the door, and the cartoon, was one Doug Barnes. Barnes was known to harbor certain heretical opinions on the subject of operating systems. Unlike most Bay Area techies who revered the Macintosh, considering it to be a true hacker’s machine, Barnes was fond of pointing out that the Mac, with its hermetically sealed architecture, was actually hostile to hackers, who are prone to tinkering and dogmatic about openness. By contrast, the IBM-compatible line of machines, which can easily be taken apart and plugged back together, was much more hackable.
So when I got home I began messing around with Linux, which is one of many, many different concrete implementations of the abstract, Platonic ideal called Unix. I was not looking forward to changing over to a new OS, because my credit cards were still smoking from all the money I’d spent on Mac hardware o
ver the years. But Linux’s great virtue was, and is, that it would run on exactly the same sort of hardware as the Microsoft OSes—which is to say, the cheapest hardware in existence. As if to demonstrate why this was a great idea, I was, within a week or two of returning home, able to get my hands on a then-decent computer (a 33-MHz 486 box) for free, because I knew a guy who worked in an office where they were simply being thrown away. Once I got it home, I yanked the hood off, stuck my hands in, and began switching cards around. If something didn’t work, I went to a used-computer outlet and pawed through a bin full of components and bought a new card for a few bucks.
The availability of all this cheap but effective hardware was an unintended consequence of decisions that had been made more than a decade earlier by IBM and Microsoft. When Windows came out, and brought the GUI to a much larger market, the hardware regime changed: the cost of color video cards and high-resolution monitors began to drop, and is dropping still. This free-for-all approach to hardware meant that Windows was unavoidably clunky compared to MacOS. But the GUI brought computing to such a vast audience that volume went way up and prices collapsed. Meanwhile Apple, which so badly wanted a clean, integrated OS with video neatly integrated into processing hardware, had fallen far behind in market share, at least partly because their beautiful hardware cost so much.
But the price that we Mac owners had to pay for superior aesthetics and engineering was not merely a financial one. There was a cultural price too, stemming from the fact that we couldn’t open up the hood and mess around with it. Doug Barnes was right. Apple, in spite of its reputation as the machine of choice of scruffy, creative hacker types, had actually created a machine that discouraged hacking, while Microsoft, viewed as a technological laggard and copycat, had created a vast, disorderly parts bazaar—a primordial soup that eventually self-assembled into Linux.