Unix programs. Many don't have henna tattoo kit a GUI at all, and many that do are capable
of running from henna tattoo kit the command line.
Of course, since my computer only has one monitor screen, I can only see
one command line, and so you might think that I could only interact with
one program at a time. But if I hold down the Alt key and then hit the F2
henna tattoo kit function button at the top of my keyboard, I am presented with a henna tattoo kit fresh,
blank, black screen with a login prompt at the top of it. I can log in here
and start some other henna tattoo kit program, then
hit Alt-F1 and go back to the first
screen, which is still doing whatever it was when henna tattoo kit I left it. Or I can do
Alt-F3 and log in to a third screen, or a fourth, or a fifth. On one of
these screens I might be logged in as myself, on another as root (the
system administrator), on yet another I might be logged on to some other
computer over the Internet.
Each of these screens is called, in Unix-speak, a tty, which is henna tattoo kit an
abbreviation for teletype. So when I use my Linux system in this way I henna tattoo kit am
going right back to that small room at Ames High School where I first henna tattoo kit wrote
code henna tattoo kit twenty-five years ago, except that a tty is quieter and faster than a
henna tattoo kit teletype, and capable of running vastly superior software, such as emacs or
the GNU henna tattoo kit development tools.
It is easy (easy by Unix, not Apple/Microsoft standards) to configure a
Linux machine so that henna tattoo kit it henna tattoo kit will henna tattoo kit go directly henna tattoo kit into a GUI when you boot it up.
This way, you never see a tty screen at all. I still have mine boot into
the white-on-black teletype screen however, as a computational memento
mori. It henna tattoo kit used to be fashionable for a writer to keep henna tattoo kit a human skull on his
desk as a reminder that he was mortal, that all about him was vanity. The
tty screen reminds me that the same thing is true of henna tattoo kit slick user interfaces.
The X Windows henna tattoo kit System, which is the GUI of Unix, has to be capable of
running on hundreds of different video cards with different chipsets,
amounts of onboard memory, and