The Logic Off Topic list

Kurt Otto wrote:
>On 02/05/2005, at 7:52 AM, gswerner2002 wrote:
>
>> Is a Mac system UNIX based the same way the old Windows systems were
>> DOS based?
>
>Yes if you are referring to OS X.

It always used to amuse me the way some Mac types I encountered over the
years thought the fact that DOS underpinned Windows was some sort of dirty
little secret. It was as if they thought Mac OS8 or 9 was nifty vector
graphics all the way down to the silicon or something.

Anyone who has the slightest understanding of computation will be aware
that a CPU does not natively understand "drag and drop" and other graphical
interface operations. At the machine level it can only deal with really
basic things - reading or writing data to or from memory locations or to
disk, adding and multiplying - nuts and bolts stuff. 

Everything going on at the user level needs to be translated by the lower
levels of the OS into instructions the CPU can actually perform. 

In a graphical system with no command line interface available to the user
(pre OSX Mac), anything that has not been set up as a GUI controlled
operation cannot be done AT ALL. Now that the Mac OS has a CLI this obvious
benefit (from a computer savvy user/programmer point of view) is now
perceived as a selling point rather than a detriment. 

Regards,
M