Unix: Here We GO!

Hi friends! I want to talk about Unix with you today. Don't worry, I'm not that much expert to bore you out already, ;D I've just started to read the Harley Hahn's book on Unix a few days ago. I was inspired by my senior friend Taskinoor Hasan at Bangladesh Open Source Network and hired this wonder book on Unix from him. Even though I'm reading in Computer Science and Engineering for four months, you can consider myself a complete computer illiterate! But anyway, this should be one of those books that will eventually take me to the light!

Anyway, let's turn ourselves to Unix. Unix is an operating system to say the least. So, you can expect at least to do the jobs of memory maintaining, file managing and other OS stuffs from Unix. As I was reading the first few chapters of Hahn's book, I was fascinated to know that any Unix computer can communicate with any other Unix computer! Well, after all we're all sons and daughters of Adam and Eve! Even though the name Unix means something that is maintained by a single person, it's actually designed for the multiuser environment. Now let's talk about a few common terminology.

Hosts and Terminals
Every Unix system has a host (at least). A host is a piece of hardware that has all the things in it (you know what things ;) Surprisingly, not one but many Terminals can have access to this host. What's this Terminal guy anyway? Well, a terminal can be a keyboard and an screen and possibly a mouse, that can set a communication with the host and even the one that's attached with the host has no particular especiality. Let's say, a terminal can be as close as the life is from death and even can be as far as the heaven from the earth! The thing that surprised me the most that even though you see a character exactly the same time as you typed it on the keyboard, it is not exactly the case. If you press "I love you", it would only be visible after the host reads it and ECHOES the letters back to the terminal and finally to the screen. Wow, who says computers don't know how to love! (Or even make then visible :D Now I can recall one similar situation where I didn't actually see any CPU. It was at the sun lab of my university. Aha! So it was a host that was missing!

Workstation
When I was a child (many say I still am :( ), I travelled a lot in train. And it always amazed me when I passed through a railway station. Everyday hundreds of trains pass through an station, and you could expect to have the station people to have the "ah! forget it" type of emotions towards the train. But to my wonder, it never happened. If you ever come to my country, you'll see that whenever a train passes through an station, people, no matter how busy they are will keep looking at it.

Back to Unix. What if a Unix is installed at your home pc and you have no access to any other network. Obviously, you have a host (your CPU) and a Terminal (your keyboard and screen). In this case, your system would be called a workstation. You might say, Wow! I'll rule my own world! But as you can see, dictators tends to be foolish. Why? Cause you can't do everything by yourself! If you had a shared host, he would have given you more choices like cool softwares (and more porn movies, if you're a teenager :) and an expert would actually keep a backup for your system! You can not get them done all by yourself, don't you remember, your boy/girlfriend would be crazy if s/he hear that you are nothing but a computer freek! But don't worry. Workstations can also be connected by networks!

Next time I'll talk about client server and ummm.....we'll see..

Good Night friends
Bye for now!