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console: n. 1. The operator's station of a mainframe. In
times past, this was a privileged location that conveyed godlike powers to
anyone with fingers on its keys. Under Unix and other modern timesharing
OSes, such privileges are guarded by passwords instead, and the console is
just the tty the system was booted from. Some of
the mystique remains, however, and it is traditional for sysadmins to post
urgent messages to all users from the console (on Unix, /dev/console).
2. On microcomputer Unix boxes, the main screen and keyboard (as
opposed to character-only terminals talking to a serial port). Typically
only the console can do real graphics or run
X.
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