Hi - This is amazingly touching and true. I miss these
days as well - especially the intensity of the writers,
Michael, the lack of spam, Andy's writing (which I reprinted
in a book, Being On Line, and the energy and excitement of the
Net at that point. By the way, Tom Ellis is on Cybermind,
which is still going strong from those days at
listserv@listserv.aol.com. And it was really good to hear
from you - it's amazing how fast time goes by online...
Please do stay in touch - I'm going to send the URL out to other
people who would care - love, Alan

Hey there Matt:

I don't quite feel the same nostalgia, because I don't share some of the same experiences you have described. But your sense of the command line operating in the void of DOS is resonant.

We are being abstracted further and further from the device itself. There is a certain inevitablility in the evolution, similar to the kind you also see in other machines; a car, for instance. Vanishing are the days when you could get "under the hood" and service the vehicle. Perhaps disappearing, as well, the meditative qualities, the cerebral merging of mind and machine.

GUIs are great. But I still love to take a peak behind the curtains, gaze at the resident code. Behind this yet the machine, Delphically brooding, waiting...

John

I enjoyed this post. Reading _In the Beginning Was the Command Line_ was almost a religious experience for me. It's useful to recall that for the really old-timers, the command line interface was a fantastic step forward from the days of punched cards.

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