[By Don Hopkins, hopkins@cs.cmu.edu]
It had been a long night of caffeine abuse on a Sun
workstation, and another can of coke was empty... I pointed the mouse
at an available shell window, and typed "cat > /dev/null" ... After
pushing the can through the screen and into the window, I typed ^D. It
was gone.
At this point, I realized that the glass had never been quite
so permeable before. Wondering how the desktop would feel, I stuck my
hand through the glass to find out.
The root grey background felt rough and bumpy, like the screen you
use to keep bugs out when you have windows open.
I inserted my fingers into a shell window and wiggled them around
in the Unix. I noticed the warm, steady throbbing of the Unix virtual
machine. I could feel a huge heap of Unix utilities, each with a
unique bouquet of switches and knobs and frobs that makes it hard to
pick up.
Most comforting of all was my nice, soft, fur lined Emacs. It
fit like a glove. It's a glove that lets my hands do to files what
superman's hands do to lumps to coal.
Next, I ran my fingers over the rough, jagged lines of the
graphs in the system performance monitor window, pricking my finger on
the sudden peak in CPU time brought about by my intrusion into this
micro-world.
The unexpected pain caused a sudden context switch, and I
abruptly found myself slumped in a chair, in front of a keyboard, with
my face pressed up against a screen of solid glass. Wiping the nose
prints off of the screen, I wondered if I had dozed off or something.
According to the perfmon window, though, that was the most CPU intensive
dream I'd ever had.
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