Little Billy in a Dark Place

I have a secret theory. I think that Bill Gates was traumatized by a teletype machine.

Don't believe me?

Why did powershell take off after he left the company? Especially since it was in development during his tenure there? Why make it the tool of choice for administration of Exchange 2007, after years of pointy-clicky?

A co-worker has confirmed this suspicion (and was actually the first to point out the sudden command line culture appearing in Redmond after his departure).

Ok, so there was DOS to contend with. But maybe that was also part of the issue. The entire "letters on a grid on the screen" subculture pretty much lived there in PC-land for 10 years. When people think of command-line, they usually think of minicomputers, but those inside the industry usually think of Unix. And we all know how he just looooves Unix.

Odd, how everything in the last 15 years with software development is marketed as "Visual Crapulence version Ten-Zillion", yet dotNET shows up as a compiler that works on a command line.

There's a time and place for GUI interfaces. When the metaphor is right, they reduce effort and make it easy for millions to use their computers in a (relatively) sane manner.

But programming usually isn't one of them.