In the beginning was the command line

Source: In the beginning was the command line by Neal Stephenson

The Command Line and the Architecture of Digital Reality

Imagine a teenager taking a ride in a rusty, balky, old MGB sports car. To the worried passengers, the driver looks like a madman stalling and backfiring around town, but to the driver, the ride is an exhilarating, direct experience. The MGB might be a lousy, unreliable vehicle, but it is highly responsive; every pebble on the road is felt in the bones, and every nuance is transmitted instantly to the driver’s hands, allowing him to extend his senses into the machine.

Contrast this with modern, hermetically sealed cars where passengers ride in comfort, but the inner workings of the machine remain a complete mystery. This contrast perfectly captures how we interact with technology today: the raw, thrilling connection of direct control versus the comfortable, heavily mediated illusion.

I keep coming back to this metaphor when I’m debugging in production. There’s something viscerally different about SSH-ing into a server and watching logs stream by versus clicking through a polished monitoring dashboard. Both get you information, but only one makes you feel like you’re actually touching the machine.

The True Nature and Value of Operating Systems

At its core, a computer’s operating system (OS) is simply a collection of necessary, duplicated codes that perform basic hardware functions—like sending light to a screen, saving data in memory, connecting to a network, and opening files. Because these fundamental routines are universally required by almost all programs, operating systems inherently do not add unique value to the user and are ultimately destined to become free.

The real commercial value in computing lies not in the operating system itself, but in the applications that run on it and the permanent data they create. If a user’s data can only be opened by a specific, proprietary version of a software application, that software retains immense commercial value. This is why tech companies often rely on closed systems—like Apple’s Mac ecosystem—where the hardware and applications are tightly bundled to maintain profitability.

This is why Notion, Evernote, Obsidian and Emacs are so different in their approach to data. Emacs,Obsidian stores everything in plain markdown files you can open anywhere. Notion locks your data behind their API. Guess which one I trust with my thinking?

The hard part: Like Stephenson notes about hacking and writing—what’s difficult isn’t the execution but deciding what to execute. The technical part is often easier than the conceptual decision-making.

The Tech Market and the Race for Relevance

The technology market effectively operates in the “technosphere” that sits perfectly between the fundamentally free OS below and the crazy, speculative things that have yet to be productized above.

We see this dynamic playing out today with massive investments in fields like Artificial Intelligence. Much like the historic operating system wars, tech giants like OpenAI(new giant of the market), Google, Anthropic and Apple are heavily investing in AI to develop new applications that will keep them relevant in changing times.

Watch what’s happening with LLMs right now. The base models are commoditizing rapidly—GPT, Claude, Llama are all converging in capability. The value isn’t in the model itself anymore; it’s in what you build on top. Context management, retrieval systems, agentic workflows—that’s where the moat is being built.

For tech-minded individuals, creating and tinkering with these new technologies has become a primary medium for self-expression. This drive for innovation has produced applications that add so much value to human life that they are now indispensable to our day-to-day existence.

Mediated Experiences: The Eloi and the Morlocks

To make computers accessible to the masses, modern OSes rely on Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) to provide a comfortable, “mediated experience”. However, these GUIs are essentially illusions; the actual work of computing happens entirely at the level of bits and bytes, and GUIs are merely representations of those bytes dressed up in a fancy way.

This creates a fascinating modus vivendi—a cultural arrangement for opposing parties to coexist in the digital world. The author compares this divide to H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine.

On one side are the Eloi—the everyday users who like to be dazzled by simple, comfortable illusions and are perfectly happy surrendering their power to the OS, letting the computer’s interface do the abstract thinking for them.

On the other side are the Morlocks—the “nerds” and hackers who do the gritty work of understanding how the complex machinery actually operates, writing the code that creates the very illusions the Eloi enjoy.

The uncomfortable truth: most software engineers today are somewhere in between. We write React components (Eloi-ish) but occasionally drop into the browser’s dev tools (Morlock tendencies). We’re bilingual, code-switching between abstraction and reality depending on what’s broken.

There’s no moral judgment here—both sides need each other. The Eloi get to be productive without understanding memory management. The Morlocks get to build empires out of their arcane knowledge. But knowing which side you’re on when you sit down to work? That matters.

The Power of the Command Line

For the Morlocks who wish to truly understand and control the machine, the command line is the only authentic interface. Using the command line is akin to directly experiencing life rather than watching a movie about life.

By stripping away the visual metaphors, users can interact with the exact routines that the OS uses. While the command line is an unforgiving environment that requires users to translate thoughts into precise alphanumeric symbols—cruelly punishing laziness and imprecision—it also removes the restrictive barriers of the GUI.

Ultimately, working directly with the machine’s true language is vastly more efficient and powerful than dangling on superficial UI elements to get work done.

This is why I keep a terminal open at all times. Not because I’m trying to look cool (though let’s be honest, it doesn’t hurt), but because there are entire classes of problems that are trivial in the shell and impossible in a GUI. Try batch-renaming 1000 files with a pattern. Or finding every occurrence of a function call across a codebase. Or composing three tools together with pipes to transform data. The GUI gives up. The command line just works.

The Persistent Relevance

What strikes me most about Stephenson’s essay—written in 1999—is how eerily prescient it remains. He predicted:

• The commoditization of operating systems (hello, Linux everywhere)
• The move to closed application ecosystems (iOS, Android walled gardens)
• The struggle for relevance through new platforms (cloud, mobile, now AI)

The core insight endures: Value lives at the edge between what’s been commoditized and what hasn’t been built yet. The OS is free. The applications are getting there. The frontier has moved again—to data, to models, to interfaces between human and machine intelligence.

The command line still sits there, waiting. Unforgiving, powerful, real. The MGB sports car of computing—unreliable, uncomfortable, but my god, you can feel every pebble on the road.