User:ThomasW/Notes InTheBeginning

Stephenson, Neal - In The Beginning... Was The Command Line, (1999), New York, Avon Books

" When we document something in the real world, we make fixed, permanent, immutable records of it. But computer documents are volatile, ephemeral constellations of data. Sometimes (as when your just opened or save them) the document as portrayed in the window is identical to what is stored, under the same name, in a file on the disk, but other times (as when you have made changes without saving them) it is completely different. In any case, every time you hit "Save" you annhilate the previous version of the "document" and replace it with whatever happens to be in the window at the moment. So even the word "save" is being used in a sense that is grotesquely misleading- "destroy one version, save another" would be more accurate" (Stephenson, 1999, Page 63)