2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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console
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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n. 1. The operator's station of a mainframe. In times past, this was a
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privileged location that conveyed godlike powers to anyone with fingers on
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its keys. Under Unix and other modern timesharing OSes, such privileges are
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guarded by passwords instead, and the console is just the tty the system was
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booted from. Some of the mystique remains, however, and it is traditional
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for sysadmins to post urgent messages to all users from the console (on
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Unix, /dev/console). 2. On microcomputer Unix boxes, the main screen and
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keyboard (as opposed to character-only terminals talking to a serial port).
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Typically only the console can do real graphics or run X.
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