In the Beginning was the Command Line

I came across this great story by a guy called Neal Stephenson. He writes books.

This one is called "In the Beginning was the Command Line" and explains very nicely the differences between vague things like Microsoft & Apple!! And from a very different perspective. Although, it's about IT and how the world came to be the way it is with software, hardware, Operating Systems and all that stuff, it is written in very plain english (except for a few lines of HTML code within the first few paragraphs!). But more than that, it's about life, about cultures, about perspectives and about beliefs.

An instance -
"The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there's no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire it point of having a culture."

Let me warn you, this is the size of a small book. (When I copied it into Word, it was 59 pages). So, my suggestion is either to take a printout, or to read it in large swathes of time. It's worth it.

Download it here in zip format.

By the way, Neal's website is hugely engrossing!