I absolutely love this article, but every time I see it do the rounds online I have to nitpick at least one thing from it. Last time it was the anecdote about MPW[0], and today I'm going to nitpick the car metaphor.

The metaphors for Windows and MacOS are swapped. Windows' technical underpinnings were - from the start - way better than Apple's. Microsoft actually bothered to copy everything from XEROX PARC, albeit poorly, while Apple saw the fancy windows-and-desktop UI and ignored the object system underpinning it. This isn't me making a jab at Apple - Jobs himself said it when he was at NeXT. Windows 95 and NT also both brought memory protection to the existing Windows API. Apple had spent several years trying and failing to build a memory protected Mac OS before just giving up and buying NeXT.

The correct metaphors are:

- Someone working at the phone company secretly designs a tram (UNIX). They're actually prohibited from selling vehicles, but they license the design under the table to a bunch of universities. A bunch of tram manufacturers make trams based off the phone company design.

- A wheel factory (Microsoft) sells wheels for bicycles. Bicycle dealerships crop up everywhere using their wheels. Even the railroads (IBM) want to get in on it, and they ship a terrible bike that everyone copies because it's the railway bike.

- Phone company designed trams are really popular and every city has like five of them. Except they keep breaking down and all the control cabs are just slightly different, so it pisses off the operators. Some kids at Berkeley try to make their own standard tram design (BSD) but they get sued by the phone company and nobody uses it.

- A car dealership (XEROX) moves in. They sell SUVs (Xerox STAR). They cost $100k each, and they only sell them in huge fleets to big corporations because XEROX wants to compete with the railroad. Nobody buys them and they leave town, but not before giving a demo of their tech to the last bicycle dealer (Apple) not using the railway design.

- The bicycle dealership decides to build their own SUV (Lisa) and a moped (Mac). The SUV is a huge flop while the moped is a minor success. Their CEO gets fired by the board and starts a trucking company (NeXT).

- A homeless man that lives on public transit and thinks vehicles should be free starts working on his own tram (GNU), but he overengineers the engine (Hurd) and it doesn't work at all. Still, he's not being sued by the phone company, so people start putting his parts into their trams anyway.

- The wheel factory learned how to make a moped from selling wheels to the moped dealer. So they sell their own moped upgrade kit (Windows). It works with any bicycle, but it looks like shit, even though it has the same power as an SUV engine.

- The wheel factory also starts work on a joint venture with the local railroad to produce their own trucks (OS/2). They can't agree on anything and divorce after a few years.

- Turns out mopeds suck! They break down constantly and need an oil change every 400 miles. The moped dealer starts work on a station wagon (Copland). A prototype is produced that's about as elegant as The Homer. It is unceremoniously cancelled.

- The wheel factory also has problems with their moped kits breaking down, but since they sold a lot more of them, they're the ones getting the reputation of selling an unreliable vehicle. They decide to design a truck of their own (Windows NT) and a car made out of moped parts (Windows 95) and sell the design to all the bicycle (now car) dealers.

- The moped company is ridiculed by the car dealers and nobody buys their elegantly designed mopeds. They wind up buying the trucking company.

- Someone in Finland designs an electric motor (Linux) that happens to fit in the homeless guy's tram. People hail this as a revolution in public transport, even though cities are full of NIMBYs who tore down the tramways and put in buses that ride worse and get delayed in traffic.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24998305

This seems strangely parochial to me. It reads a little like an American who knows San Francisco and so knows about trams has tried to imagine what a European city and country is like, and hasn't quite made the pieces fit together.

It has what I guess are American references that are meaningless to me. What is or was The Homer? In what universe are mopeds some sort of unsuccessful trial? Much of Asia has travelled by mopeds for ~75 years now; the Honda C90 is the best-selling motor vehicle of all time, and it's not even close.

As a super-extended metaphor for computing, I don't think the timeline fits together: it has Xerox, Apple, and IBM in the wrong order, but I'd find that hard to nail down. There was overlap, obviously.

It feels to me like the big influences are squeezed in, but not the smaller ones -- possibly because they mostly aren't American and don't show up on American radar. Wirth and Pascal/Modula-2/Oberon, the Lilith and Ceres; Psion; Acorn; other Apple efforts notably the Newton and things it inspired like Palm; Symbolics and InterLisp.

Nice effort. I respect the work that went into it, but it doesn't fix Stephenson's effort -- it over-extends it until it snaps, then tapes the bits together and tries again.

> A homeless man that lives on public transit and thinks vehicles should be free starts working on his own tram (GNU), but he overengineers the engine (Hurd) and it doesn't work at all. Still, he's not being sued by the phone company, so people start putting his parts into their trams anyway.

> Someone in Finland designs an electric motor (Linux) that happens to fit in the homeless guy's tram. People hail this as a revolution in public transport, even though cities are full of NIMBYs who tore down the tramways and put in buses that ride worse and get delayed in traffic.

It's so easy to forget just how strange the actual history seems when zoomed out a bit. It sounds so absurd that this is the story of the OS I'm writing this comment on, but yet here I am doing it!