This article is classified "Real"
Assuming that your terminal (the thing you sit in front of) is switched on,
you will probably be presented with some sort of login sequence. It will
ask you for your user id (or "login") and so you enter it. You will then
be asked for a password. You can enter that. When you type in your
password, marks will appear on the screen but your password won't; this is
so you know that the computer is receiving the key-presses, but prevents
people from reading your password over your shoulder.
You will probably be presented with the "message of the day". This is
meant to be a useful piece of information written by the system
administrator. "The system will be out of action after 1600 hours so be
sure to finish this week's programming project before then!" "First year
students: Friday's boolean logic lecture is cancelled" "Any games found on
this system will be immediately wiped" Unfortunately the job of changing
the message of the day is a fairly unattractive one and motd's get left
for much longer than a day. Weeks can go by during which you are never
sure if only last weeks lecture was cancelled - or this week's too.
This will probably be your first experience of the cookie program. This
ancient program displays a pithy saying, memorable quote, or bad joke at
random. (It is sometimes known as fortune, however no one has ever made
money out of it.)
After this, things diverge. You may have a fancy graphics terminal which
pops up various things like:
windows
(these are rectangles on the screen, but although made
of glass, you can't see through them)
Clocks
(digital, or analog. It is not uncommon to have more
than one clock on a screen. One interesting clock is
the sunclock which displays the current regions of day
and night on a world map)
text terminals
(something to let you do real work)
cpu load meters
(something to tell you how little work you can really do)
mail boxes
(something to tell you when you have an excuse to stop
working)
and of course,
Xeyes (which follow your mouse pointer around the screen
to give you something to play with when you are
pretending to work)
Or you may have a simple text-based terminal which gives you a prompt and
perhaps a flashing cursor if you are lucky. Don't worry about being left
behind if you only get a simple vt100 screen which only does one colour -
green. We are just going to do some simple commands for a while. The
people with fancy graphics can just point their mouse at one of the windows
which look like a "console" or "xterm".
You will hopefully get a prompt. This can be setup to be almost any piece
of text but here are a few defaults that people like to set up for new
users:
The basic default is a $ (dollar sign). This might be replaced by a >
(greater-than sign). Other's like to print the name of the machine you are
actually using - or your own user id. Other possibilities include
functions which change depending on the environment: my favourite is to put
the current time in the prompt, but the most common prompt in the world is
the one which displays the name of the current directory.