Product: 0380815931

After Stephenson’s behemoth Crytonomicon comes this slim but entertaining offering. The format is book but it feels more like a high-note guest speech given by a masterful speaker. It’s engaging, amusing, provides several laughs and some handy insights to remember long after the event.
Stephenson is a smart, widely-read guy with a keen eye, an original turn of thought and a lively imagination. The subject is computer operating systems but it’s not a dreary geeks-only read. Of course user-friendly windows, icons and other GUI-phernalia shield most of us from operating systems. And that in itself has a bunch of implications that Stephenson astutely explores.
Mac vs Microsoft was one of the few passionate ideological conflicts of the late 20th century after the demise of communism. Stephenson provides an interesting reframing of that debate, leaving you wondering whether the goodies vs. baddies split was quite so clear cut. Having put Mac and Microsoft more or less in the same box, he moves on to the free spirits of Linux and the outer reaches of BeOS
The latter part of the book is less engaging when it goes into the technicalities of working with Linux and BeOS although even here the bigger-picture implications are interesting. In such a slim volume I could have done without a couple of pages full of command line code, but even that is a typically endearing Stephenson foible. He’s so eager to communicate what he’s found out that he sometimes goes too far with the detail.
This is a really entertaining and thought-provoking read for anyone remotely interested in computers and society - and a must for anyone who enjoys Stephenson’s writing. Apart from his other books, it’s also worth checking out the big piece he wrote in Wired magazine 4.12 about the FLAG project.
Rating: 4
0380815931
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