Saturday, January 31, 2009

Stephenson, Command Lines, and Metaphors

Neal Stephenson writes:
"So an OS is a stack of metaphors and abstractions that stands between you and the telegrams, and embodying various tricks the programmer used to convert the information you're working with - be it images, e-mail messages, movies, or word-processing documents - into the necklaces of bytes that are the only things computers know how to work with" (Stephenson 18).
Look at the OS (operating system) and the GUI (graphical user interface) you're using right now. Can you find some metaphors or abstractions? Do share!

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