In the Beginning...Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson Page B

to remind us of what we ought to be reminded of while filtering out noise.
    At the upper (which is to say, closer to the user) levels, this is done through a set of conventions—menus, buttons, and so on. These work in the sense that analogies work: they help Eloi understand abstract or unfamiliar concepts by likening them to something known. But the loftier word “metaphor” is used.
    The overarching concept of the MacOS was the “desktop metaphor,” and it subsumed any number of lesser (and frequently conflicting, or at least mixed) metaphors. Under a GUI, a file (frequently called “document”) is metaphrased as a window on the screen (which is called a “desktop”). The window is almost always too small to contain the document and so you “move around,” or, more pretentiously, “navigate” in the document by “clicking and dragging” the “thumb” on the “scroll bar.” When you “type” (using a keyboard) or “draw” (using a “mouse”) into the “window” or use pull-down “menus” and “dialog boxes” to manipulate its contents, the results of your labors get stored (at least in theory) in a “file,” and later you can pull the same informationback up into another “window.” When you don’t want it anymore, you “drag” it into the “trash.”
    There is massively promiscuous metaphor-mixing going on here, and I could deconstruct it till the cows come home, but I won’t. Consider only one word: “document.” When we document something in the real world, we make fixed, permanent, immutable records of it. But computer documents are volatile, ephemeral constellations of data. Sometimes (as when you’ve just opened or saved them) the document as portrayed in the window is identical to what is stored, under the same name, in a file on the disk, but other times (as when you have made changes without saving them) it is completely different. In any case, every time you hit “Save” you annihilate the previous version of the “document” and replace it with whatever happens to be in the window at the moment. So even the word “save” is being used in a sense that is grotesquely misleading—“destroy one version, save another” would be more accurate.
    Anyone who uses a word processor for very long inevitably has the experience of putting hours of work into a long document and then losing it because the computer crashes or the power goes out. Until the moment that it disappears from the screen, the document seems every bit as solid and real as if it had been typed out in ink on paper. But in the next moment, without warning, it is completely and irretrievably gone, as if it had never existed. The user is left with a feeling of disorientation (to say nothing of annoyance) stemming from a kind ofmetaphor shear—you realize that you’ve been living and thinking inside of a metaphor that is essentially bogus.
    So GUIs use metaphors to make computing easier, but they are bad metaphors. Learning to use them is essentially a word game, a process of learning new definitions of words such as “window” and “document” and “save” that are different from, and in many cases almost diametrically opposed to, the old. Somewhat improbably, this has worked very well, at least from a commercial standpoint, which is to say that Apple/Microsoft have made a lot of money off of it. All of the other modern operating systems have learned that in order to be accepted by users they must conceal their underlying gutwork beneath the same sort of spackle. This has some advantages: if you know how to use one GUI operating system, you can probably work out how to use any other in a few minutes. Everything works a little differently, like European plumbing—but with some fiddling around, you can type a memo or surf the web.
    Most people who shop for OSes (if they bother to shop at all) are comparing not the underlying functions but the superficial look and feel. The average buyer of an OS is not