I must be in a particularly anti-Mac-enthusiast mood today. Somehow the web is conspiring to keep me in that mood because I ran across this ancient article and it irked me, particularly this section:

But perception matters. A small but vocal class of very-small-weinered[sic] self-proclaimed PC experts has been attempting to delegitimize the Mac ever since it came out. Surely you know at least one of these guys (and they are all guys):

• In the 1980s, they declared that graphical user interfaces were for sissies, dummies, and artists (and frequently insinuated that the three terms were synonymous). The Mac was overpriced and Apple was going out of business.
• In the early 1990s, they declared that Windows was just as good as a Mac, although experts would never be satisfied with less than a pure command-line interface. Discordantly, they declared the Mac “a toy”, but bemoaned that there weren’t any good games available for it.
• In the late 1990s, after everyone, including them, had switched to desktop-metaphor GUIs, they conveniently dropped their “real men stick with the command line” mantra, and instead proclaimed that Windows wasn’t merely just as good as the Mac, it was better. Or at least that it had better games. And Apple was going out of business.

Now, for reasons of full-disclosure, I'll state upfront that I was one of those people who thought GUIs were for wimps. Despite this, I happen have a huge wiener. Also, I've never thought Windows was better than anything except perhaps herpes.

But on to my response:

The reason GUI's were "for sissies" back in the 80's is because they didn't help you work more efficiently. Was it a problem with the GUI metaphor? Obviously not. The problem was that hardware was slow, memory was limited and quite frankly, very few applications from that era benefited much from a GUI. So the choices were: use a fast, efficient CLI or a slow, less-flexible GUI. Who would choose a GUI in this case? One group would be desktop publishers and graphic artists, but these folks were the minority. The other group was simply people too lazy, too stupid or too unconcerned to learn the most efficient way to accomplish a task.

Now, today, all this has changed. A CLI is still the most efficient for some tasks (i.e. remote server management), but for the most part, the GUI has caught up to the CLI in functionality, and more importantly, the hardware makes the computational inefficiency of a GUI practically unnoticable. Also the fact that all the commodity operating systems can multitask more-or-less successfully means having multiple windows is useful (I remember using Windows 3.1 solely because it allowed me to run multiple DOS windows simutaneously).

So, I'd argue it's not that "the GUI people were right all along and now the CLI people are tasting crow" so much as the way we compute has changed drastically and what was once a dumb idea now makes sense.

No doubt Steve Jobs is a visionary. But by definition, visionaries are ahead of their time and following them can make you look downright stupid.

Incidentally, remote server management is in this same boat today: stupid, lazy admins use remote desktops to manage their servers. Smart guys use SSH. Will that change? Probably, when 100Mb internet connections are commonplace and all the CLI tools have GUI equivalents. Will that make the stupid, lazy admins appear smarter or more efficient in retrospect? Only to them.