Quote Response for In the Beginning . . . Was the Command Line, pp. 1-22
New Idea:
"These strings of bytes are commonly called files or (somewhat more hiply) streams." (p.14)
This idea helped me realize that . . .
Computers are as advanced as automobile’s engines. Before I had started reading this book I was very clueless when discussions were brought up about computers. I was raised with a computer in my household, so I’ve always have used computers. But I have never thought about how they worked. I would always stop myself when I started thinking about how car engines worked and I was the same way with computers. When I read this quote, I had started to try and wrap my head around how files and documents were made. This quote goes on and explains how linear string-of-bytes make up all these things which create everything we see on the computer. They make up the images, word documents, websites, spreadsheets, graphs etc. I still don’t fully grasp the reason why we are able to see what we see on the computer, but this quote helps out some of the questions that are going on in my head.
Interpretation:
"For a short time he was extending his body and his senses into a larger realm, and doing things that he couldn't do unassisted." (p.4)
In writing this statement, the author seems to imply that . . .
One who is passionate about something will hold that something very dearly. He/she will not want to upgrade to the next big thing because he/she loves that too much. This quote is in reference to a man who loves his car. Stephenson is explaining the way this man feels about his car. The man knows how to fix the car when the car engine has messed up or the breaks have failed. He knows exactly what to do and he fixes the car and he goes right back to loving the car again. This quote explains how the car may only last a little while but his feeling and touch to the car is putting him on a whole other level. He is living in the moment instead of thinking about what may happen to his car in the future. This may be a way people buy and look at their computers, they may love their old computer and would never want to upgrade, because they have that certain connection with the computer.
Tie-In:
"It ended in July of 1995 when I tried to save a big important file on my Macintosh Powerbook and instead instead of doing so, it annihilated the data so thoroughly that two different disk crash utility programs were unable to find any trace that it had ever existed." (p.18)
Tell a detailed story from your personal experience to explain the TIE-IN:
I was 18 years old and I had started my first year in college. My dad was this technology wiz, so throughout my adolescent years I had the latest technology and was educated on the latest technology, except a hard drive. I would have thought my dad would have told me about a hard drive before heading off to college where just about anything could happen to a computer. I carried my computer everywhere. I brought my computer to the school, the library, my friend’s house and obviously my apartment. My computer was my love. I had everything on my computer from, a book I had started to write, all my pictures from childhood all the way up to my 18th birthday, all my papers I had written and senior letters I had received through e-mails. My life was on this computer. One night I was writing a paper in my room and I had a cup of water next to the computer. Somehow I had knocked the glass over and instead of grabbing my computer out of the way I tried to catch the glass which had spilled all over my keyboard. I flipped out and turned my computer off immediately and did what my father had always told me to do in this situation. I took the laptop apart and dried the computer out. I was never able to retrieve anything from the motherboard. The motherboard had blown and everything was gone. To this day my father would ask, “Why didn’t you save everything on a external hard drive?” And I would always just role my eyes and say, “I had never known there was such a thing.”
No comments:
Post a Comment