The first type is terminal window you open in a desktop environment. Virtual ConsoleĪs a matter of fact, there are two types of terminal emulator. You can switch between a standard user and an administrator at any time. Your monitor and keyboard are the console, and also terminal. Other terminals have no permission to login in single-user mode.Ĭonsole and terminal are often seen as synonyms on personal computers. And if the operating system boots into single-user mode, you can only use console to login. For example, if the operating system failed to boot up, there would be error message displayed on the console, but not on other terminals.
There’s not much difference in appearance between standard terminal and the console, but console can do something that standard terminals can not do. In the 1970s and 1980s, terminal are often connected to the host by wire, but there’s a special terminal that is attached to the host. Now you can still find Xterm in your Linux distribution. It emulates the VT102 terminal made by DEC. It tells you that gnome-terminal is a terminal emulation application.
#Me interface trminal manual
If you use Gnome terminal, you can run the following command to read the manual of gnome-terminal. They are not real terminals, but the operating system thinks they are. Sometimes people call them virtual terminal.
#Me interface trminal software
These days we often type commands in a software terminal, which is better known as terminal emulator or terminal emulation application. In the 1970s and 1980s, people type commands sitting in front of a real terminal. The most famous graphics terminal is X Terminal, which provided the basic support for the X window system. Graphics terminal is better because it can also show graphics/pictures on the screen. It’s designed so well that it became a standard for later terminals. The most famous character terminal is the VT100 made by DEC in 1978. VT05 video terminal Character Terminal vs Graphics TerminalĬharacter terminal is also known as text terminal, which can only output text-based information. You use the keyboard to input information and print output on paper. Teletype (TTY) was mainly used to send and receive typed messages in telegraphy, but they can also be used to put information into computer and get information out from it. So they found an alternate solution: use the cheap ASR33 teletype as terminal. And keyboards were physically attached to computers. However, every computer devices, including monitor, were very expensive in those days. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie wanted to make Unix become a multi-user operating system, which means each user would have a terminal to connect to the computer. The PDP-7 minicomputer used by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (The two creators of Unix) cost 72,000 US dollars in 1965, and the GE-45 mainframe cost 10 million US dollars. Before then, we can only use expensive mainframes and minicomputers in big companies or universities. Personal computers came into daily lives in the late 1970s. Terminal = Input device + Output device The First Terminal The opposite of terminal is the host, which includes devices like CPU, RAM, HDD and so on. But in the Unix and Linux world, input and output devices are called terminal. They are commonly called peripheral devices. Output device includes monitor and speaker. These days, input device of personal computers includes: keyboard, mouse, and microphone. Human need an interface to put information into the computer and read output from it. Human and computer are two independent entities. The Merriam-Webster dictionary gives us a good definition of terminal in the computing field:Ī combination of a keyboard and output device (such as a video display unit) by which data can be entered into or output from a computer or electronic communications system. Terminal is An Interface Between Human and ComputerĪs a noun, terminal has many meanings. Understanding this basic concept is important if you want to master Linux.
In this article, I will be explaining the real meaning of Linux terminal and console. Terminal is the interface through which you type cryptic Linux commands, but is terminal just a window with command prompt on your Linux desktop? Well, the fact is, the terminal you are using now is probably not a real terminal.
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