Cracking Open the Shell
Another unusual feature of UNIX systems, especially for those of you who come from either the Macintosh or the Windows environments, is that UNIX is designed to be a command-line-based system rather than a more graphically based (picture-oriented) system. That's a mixed blessing. It makes UNIX harder to learn, but the system is considerably more powerful than fiddling with a mouse to drag little pictures about on the screen. In UNIX parlance, a command-line interpreter is called a shell, and you'll see that various shells are available, differing in both syntax and capabilities.
There are graphical interfaces to UNIX, built within the X Window System environment. Notable ones are Motif, OpenWindows, and Open Desktop. Even ...
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