8 Oct
2011
8 Oct
'11
3 p.m.
On 10/08/2011 04:09 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
Yes, I was thinking about pre-OSX for desktop Apple machines. I am told
that OSX does have an accessible unix shell :-)
Yes. Forgive me for jumping in, but I can add a lot from direct
experience here. From about 2003 until just recently, *in my opinion*,
MacOS X was the best way to get a fast, modern, graphics-enabled UNIX
workstation on the desktop. At any one time, I have probably thirty
shell windows open. (regardless of what OS I'm running) It is UNIX,
through and through.
I regard them as being difficult to do anything useful
with (my esperience
is that they make easy jobs trivial and diffiuclt jobs impossible).
I find that hard to believe. These beasties run Unix, you can script
almost anything. Even the GUI is scriptable. I prefer OS X or Linux
over the evil OS from Redmond.
Or are you talking about pre-OS X? However, their portable
devices don't seem to have any such shell, they don't seem to have
anything that makes them useful for difficult tasks
No, this is incorrect.
First, there are very good SSH/telnet clients for iOS devices, which
makes accessing shells on other systems trivial, I do it all the time.
Second, iPhones and iPads are UNIX machines! They have a shell. You
have to do a little work to get to it the first time, but that takes all
of five minutes.
I have a C compiler running on my iPhone. That was correctly worded:
I don't mean "I compile stuff on my desktop machine to run on my
iPhone", I mean, I can fire up a shell prompt ON my
disconnected-from-the-world iPhone, start emacs (running it ON the
iPhone), write ordinary UNIX/posix C code, compile it (again, ON the
iPhone), and execute it. When it's connected to a network, I can ssh
*into* the iPhone and do the same.
I used this functionality recently to build simh. Now, when I "need
a fix" away from my desk, I run RSTS/E, RT-11, 2.11BSD, and OS/8
directly on my iPhone from a shell prompt. I am running an install of
VAX-VMS v7.3 from a CDROM image to an emulated RA90 as I type this.
It's a UNIX machine!
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
New Kensington, PA