Chapter 4: The Portability Priority

Overview

So there I was, an attendee at the 1991 USENIX Technical Conference, strolling the halls of Nashville's Opryland Hotel, reveling in the grandiose luxury of that country music citadel, picking my way through the crowds, hoping to happen upon someone famous, and basking in the satisfaction of having just signed a publishing contract.

Things had gone extremely well. My proposal for a book on the Unix philosophy was accepted without hesitation. ("So many people need to read this book.") Contract negotiations went smoothly. ("I'd like n dollars for an advance." "Okay, you've got it.") A reasonable deadline had been set. ("We'll give you an extra couple of months to make it easier on you.") You couldn't have asked for a better situation.

To tell the truth, I was scared to death. After getting over the initial enthusiasm of signing up to author a book on a topic I'd been harping on for years, I ran headlong into a reality that I was mentally unprepared for: I now had to write the darn thing.

My past writing experience consisted of pumping out features for a regional entertainment magazine. I'd learned how to string words together. I knew about topic sentences, action verbs, and the use of passive voice. I could hook a reader and keep him interested. However, writing magazine articles only made me a great sprinter. Now it was time to run the marathon.

The first thing I did was sprint to a friend for advice. An author of several books, he had run this race before. What could I do, I asked, to get a handle on this seemingly insurmountable task?

"Buy a notebook PC," he replied.

Seeing the Neanderthal look on my face, he explained that writing a book is an all-or-nothing proposition. It takes an intense, concentrated effort to put so many thoughts down on paper. You must think about the book nearly always: while brushing your teeth in the morning, while driving to and from work, between meetings, while having lunch, during your workout at the health club, while watching television with the family, and before you go to sleep at night. The notebook PC is the only text entry device at once powerful and portable enough to enable you to write a book just about anywhere.

An amazing feat of modern microtechnology, the typical notebook PC puts most capabilities of a desktop PC in a package thinner than a three-ring binder. Weighing less than five pounds, its low-profile design makes it as easy to carry around as a college textbook. They come with hard disk drives and built-in modems, making them viable workhorses for everyday computing tasks such as calculating spreadsheets, word processing, and programming.

Some years ago, Apple Computer ran a television ad showing two executives discussing the merits of various personal computers. Both men were talking about technical specifications, and one appeared to have a profound revelation: The most powerful computer is not the one with the fastest CPU, the biggest disk drives, or the most terrific software. It is the one that is used most.

Judged solely by this criterion, the notebook PC will someday rank as the most powerful computer ever built. It doesn't have the blinding speed of, say, a laboratory supercomputer. Nor does it have the storage capacity of the latest disk farm technology. Its graphics capabilities will probably always lag behind the raciest desktop screens. Hardly the epitome of performance, it has only one real advantage: portability.

This brings us to the next tenet of the Unix philosophy. You might wish to make a special note of this one. It marks the reason Unix has nullified the longevity of thousands of man-years' worth of software development effort.