In the Beginning was the Command Line

[ahhaa]

This essay was mentioned in a Techrepublic security blog, thought it might be of interest:

In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson

About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines for use in the home. The business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all.

the rest can be downloaded at http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

[ahhaa]

&... I just happened on this Cory Doctorow SciFi free download too:

When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth
http://craphound.com/overclocked/download/

[greymalkin]

if you'd like to go back further in time, check out Douglas Engelbart's "Mother of all Demo's" which took place in December, 1968. He had the idea that the computer could be used for personal tasks and developed the mouse, hyperlinks, and many other things that took decades to actually be seen in personal computers. Unfortunately people just weren't ready for his bizarre ideas, and mocked his ideas that the computer should be used for personal reasons (the computer at the time was a strictly business/utility machine) and many people thought his demo was a fake.

you can look him up in wikipedia and follow the links to his demo:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos