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- 7. the command line as as a shared world
- ========================================
-
- In an earlier chapter, I wrote:
-
- > You can think of the shell as a kind of environment you inhabit, in much
- > the way your character inhabits an adventure game.
-
- It turns out that sometimes there are other human inhabitants of this
- environment.
-
- Unix was built on a model known as "time-sharing". This is an idea with a lot
- of history, but the very short version is that when computers were rare and
- expensive, it made sense for lots of people to be able to use them at once.
- This is part of the story of how ideas like e-mail and chat were originally
- born, well before networks took over the world: As ways for the many users of
- one computer to communicate on the same machine.
-
- Says Dennis Ritchie:
-
- > What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do
- > programming, but a system around which a fellowship could form. We knew from
- > experience that the essence of communal computing, as supplied by
- > remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a
- > terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication.
-
- Times have changed, and while it's mundane to use software that's shared
- between many users, it's not nearly as common as it once was for a bunch of us
- to be logged into the same computer all at once.
-
- -> ★ <-
-
- In the mid 1990s, when I was first exposed to Unix, it was by opening up a
- program called NCSA Telnet on one of the Macs at school and connecting to a
- server called mother.esu1.k12.ne.us.
-
- NCSA Telnet was a terminal, not unlike the kind that you use to open a shell on
- your own Linux computer, a piece of software that itself emulated actual,
- physical hardware from an earlier era. Hardware terminals were basically very
- simple computers with keyboards, screens, and just enough networking brains to
- talk to a _real_ computer somewhere else. You'll still come across these
- scattered around big institutional environments. The last time I looked over
- the shoulder of an airline checkin desk clerk, for example, I saw green
- monochrome text that was probably coming from an IBM mainframe somewhere
- far away.
-
- Part of what was exciting about being logged into a computer somewhere else
- was that you could _talk to people_.
-
- -> ★ <-
-
- _{This chapter is a work in progress.}_
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