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