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T A B L E__T A L K Should companies be allowed to track their employees' Web surfing? Weigh in on employee privacy vs. corporate rights in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Maximum confusion
Let's Get This Straight Wired nests with Condé Nast Let's Get
This Straight Folk rock
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The dumbing-down of programming REBELLING AGAINST MICROSOFT, "MY COMPUTER" AND EASY-TO-USE WIZARDS, AN ENGINEER REDISCOVERS THE JOYS OF DIFFICULT COMPUTING.
BY ELLEN ULLMAN Last month I committed an act of technical rebellion: I bought one operating system instead of another. On the surface, this may not seem like much, since an operating system is something that can seem inevitable. It's there when you get your machine, some software from Microsoft, an ur-condition that can be upgraded but not undone. Yet the world is filled with operating systems, it turns out. And since I've always felt that a computer system is a significant statement about our relationship to the world -- how we organize our understanding of it, how we want to interact with what we know, how we wish to project the whole notion of intelligence -- I suddenly did not feel like giving in to the inevitable. My intention had been to buy an upgrade to Windows NT Server, which was a completely sensible thing for me to be doing. A nice, clean, up-to-date system for an extra machine was the idea, somewhere to install my clients' software; a reasonable, professional choice in a world where Microsoft platforms are everywhere. But somehow I left the store carrying a box of Linux from a company called Slackware. Linux: home-brewed, hobbyist, group-hacked. UNIX-like operating system created in 1991 by Linus Torvalds then passed around from hand to hand like so much anti-Soviet samizdat. Noncommercial, sold on the cheap mainly for the cost of the documentation, impracticable except perhaps for the thrill of actually looking at the source code and utterly useless to my life as a software engineering consultant. But buying Linux was no mistake. For the mere act of installing the system -- stripping down the machine to its components, then rebuilding its capabilities one by one -- led me to think about what has happened to the profession of programming, and to consider how the notion of technical expertise has changed. I began to wonder about the wages, both personal and social, of spending so much time with a machine that has slowly absorbed into itself as many complications as possible, so as to present us with a façade that says everything can and should be "easy."
I began by ridding my system of Microsoft. I came of technical age with UNIX, where I learned with power-greedy pleasure that you could kill a system right out from under yourself with a single command. It's almost the first thing anyone teaches you: Run as the root user from the root directory, type in rm -r f *, and, at the stroke of the ENTER key, gone are all the files and directories. Recursively, each directory deleting itself once its files have been deleted, right down to the very directory from which you entered the command: the snake swallowing its tail. Just the knowledge that one might do such great destruction is heady. It is the technical equivalent of suicide, yet UNIX lets you do it anyhow. UNIX always presumes you know what you're doing. You're the human being, after all, and it is a mere operating system. Maybe you want to kill off your system. But Microsoft was determined to protect me from myself. Consumer-oriented, idiot-proofed, covered by its pretty skin of icons and dialog boxes, Windows refused to let me harm it. I had long ago lost my original start-up disk, the system was too fritzed to make a new one and now it turned away my subterfuges of DOS installation diskette, boot disks from other machines, later versions of utilities. Can't reformat active drive. Wrong version detected. Setup designed for systems without an operating system; operating system detected; upgrade version required. A cascade of error messages, warnings, beeps; a sort of sound and light show -- the Wizard of Oz lighting spectacular fireworks to keep me from flinging back the curtain to see the short fat bald man. For Microsoft's self-protective skin is really only a show, a lure to the determined engineer, a challenge to see if you're clever enough to rip the covers off. The more it resisted me, the more I knew I would enjoy the pleasure of deleting it. Two hours later, I was stripping down the system. Layer by layer it fell away. Off came Windows NT 3.51; off came a wayward co-installation of Windows 95 where it overlaid DOS. I said goodbye to video and sound; goodbye wallpaper; goodbye fonts and colors and styles; goodbye windows and icons and menus and buttons and dialogs. All the lovely graphical skins turned to so much bitwise detritus. It had the feel of Keir Dullea turning off the keys to HAL's memory core in the film "2001," each keyturn removing a "higher" function, HAL's voice all the while descending into mawkish, babyish pleading. Except that I had the sense that I was performing an exactly opposite process: I was making my system not dumber but smarter. For now everything on the system would be something put there by me, and in the end the system itself would be cleaner, clearer, more knowable -- everything I associate with the idea of "intelligent." What I had now was a bare machine, just the hardware and its built-in logic. No more Microsoft muddle of operating systems. It was like hosing down your car after washing it: the same feeling of virtuous exertion, the pleasure of the sparkling clean machine you've just rubbed all over. Yours. Known down to the crevices. Then, just to see what would happen, I turned on the computer. It powered up as usual, gave two long beeps, then put up a message in large letters on the screen: What? Had I somehow killed off my read-only memory? It doesn't matter that you tell yourself you're an engineer and game for whatever happens. There is still a moment of panic when things seem to go horribly wrong. I stared at the message for a while, then calmed down: It had to be related to not having an operating system. What else did I think could happen but something weird? But what something weird was this exactly? I searched the Net, found hundreds of HOW-TO FAQs about installing Linux, thousands about uninstalling operating systems -- endless pages of obscure factoids, strange procedures, good and bad advice. I followed trails of links that led to interesting bits of information, currently useless to me. Long trails that ended in dead ends, missing pages, junk. Then, sometime about 1 in the morning, in a FAQ about Enhanced IDE, was the answer:
I had not seen a PC with built-in BASIC in some 16 years, yet here it still was, vestigial trace of the interpreter, something still remembering a time when the machine could be used to interpret and execute my entries as lines in a BASIC program. The least and smallest thing the machine could do in the absence of all else, its one last imperative: No operating system! Look for BASIC! It was like happening upon some primitive survival response, a low-level bit of hard wiring, like the mysterious built-in knowledge that lets a blind little mouseling, newborn and helpless, find its way to the teat. This discovery of the trace of BASIC was somehow thrilling -- an ancient pot shard found by mistake in the rubble of an excavation. Now I returned to the FAQs, lost myself in digging, passed another hour in a delirium of trivia. Hex loading addresses for devices. Mysteries of the BIOS old and new. Motherboards certified by the company that had written my BIOS and motherboards that were not. I learned that my motherboard was an orphan. It was made by a Taiwanese company no longer in business; its BIOS had been left to languish, supported by no one. And one moment after midnight on Dec. 31, 1999, it would reset my system clock to ... 1980? What? Why 1980 and not zero? Then I remembered: 1980 was the year of the first IBM PC. 1980 was Year One in desktop time. The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of the computing machine. Under Windows was DOS; under DOS, BASIC; and under them both the date of its origins recorded like a birth memory. Here was the very opposite of the authoritative, all-knowing system with its pretty screenful of icons. Here was the antidote to Microsoft's many protections. The mere impulse toward Linux had led me into an act of desktop archaeology. And down under all those piles of stuff, the secret was written: We build our computers the way we build our cities -- over time, without a plan, on top of ruins. - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY SCOTT LAUMANN |
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