. Terminal The keyhole into Mac OS X's Unix innards is a program called Terminal, which sits in your Applications Utilities folder (see Figure 16-2). Terminal is named after the terminals (computers that consist of only a monitor and keyboard) that still tap into the mainframe computers at some universities and corporations | . Terminal The keyhole into Mac OS X s Unix innards is a program called Terminal which sits in your Applications Utilities folder see Figure 16-2 . Terminal is named after the terminals computers that consist of only a monitor and keyboard that still tap into the mainframe computers at some universities and corporations. In the same way Terminal is just a window that passes along messages to and from the Mac s brain. The first time you open Terminal you ll notice that there s not much in its window except the date time and source of your last login and the command line prompt Figure 16-2 . UP TO SPEED Mac OS X s Unix Roots In 1969 Bell Labs programmer Ken Thompson found himself with some spare time after his main project an operating system called Multics was canceled. Bell Labs had withdrawn from the expensive project disappointed with the results after four years of work. But Thompson still thought the project an OS that worked well as a cooperative software-development environment was a promising idea. Eventually he and colleague Dennis Ritchie came up with the OS that would soon be called Unix a pun on Multics . Bell Labs saw the value of Unix agreed to support further development and became the first corporation to adopt it. In the age when Thompson and Ritchie started their work on Unix most programmers wrote code that would work on only one kind of computer or even one computer model . Unix however was one of the first portable operating systems its programs could run on different kinds of computers without having to be completely rewritten. That s because Thompson and Ritchie wrote Unix using a new programming language of their own invention called C. In a language like C programmers need only write their code once. After that a software Cuisinart called a compiler can convert the newly hatched software into the form a particular computer model can understand. Unix soon found its way into labs and thanks to AT T s low academic licensing fees .
