console

n. 1. The operator's station of a mainframe. In times past, this was a
privileged location that conveyed godlike powers to anyone with fingers on
its keys. Under Unix and other modern timesharing OSes, such privileges are
guarded by passwords instead, and the console is just the tty the system was
booted from. Some of the mystique remains, however, and it is traditional
for sysadmins to post urgent messages to all users from the console (on
Unix, /dev/console). 2. On microcomputer Unix boxes, the main screen and
keyboard (as opposed to character-only terminals talking to a serial port).
Typically only the console can do real graphics or run X.

