The Logic Off Topic list

Hey there gswerner2002,

Sorry to disagree with Kurt (although he's not wrong), your question should
probably be a bit more pointed.

If you're referring to the user's experience with the interface, the answer
to your question is no.  Rather, the gorgeous user interface we have come to
know and love as Mac OS X appears to be an integral part of the UNIX variant
that runs it. The user is very insulated from UNIX.  Even after a kernel
panic (a serious low-level system crash), control is passed to a routine
that politely dims the screen, and displays a window (in multiple languages,
BTW) indicating a reboot is in order.

I remember working with early versions of Windows that, after a crash, would
throw me back into DOS (I would be staring at a DOS command prompt).  Duh!

Early beta versions of Mac OS X would crash and sometimes throw some UNIX
junk on the screen.  At that point, the Mac would only accept UNIX commands,
but that was early versions of OS X.  The refinements to the OS have kept
the user away from UNIX.

What you will not see with Mac OS X, is UNIX stuff coming up early on in the
boot stages (as early Windows OS's would do with text-based DOS stuff,
giving you the feeling you were working in some graphic user interface that
was simply a stand alone program running in the DOS environment).  Rather,
OS X will yield just the opposite feeling: to get a UNIX command prompt, you
must run a program (Terminal) that would give you access to a UNIX command
line prompt.

To answer your question with any further degree of detail, would require an
extremely intimate knowledge of Mac OS X (at the component level), which few
people have.

Is it that you're just curious about Mac OS X, or do you have some deeper
need for this info?


Stephen Laianca

- Just up the road from the Bada Bing -
  Fugedaboudit! ...

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