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["Shea Tisdale" <shea AT sheatisdale.com>]

Tanner Lovelace scribed:
> 
> zman said the following on 4/6/04 2:16 PM:
> 
> > On Tue, 6 Apr 2004, Sil Greene wrote:
> >
> >>.:
> >>.:When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
> >>.:
> >>When all you've got is rock, everything looks like a crackpipe?
> >
> >
> > When all you've ever used is Windows, command-lines seem like a bad
> thing.
> >
> 
> Actually in this case, I believe it's "MacOS", but close enough.
> For general use, a GUI can be nice, but if you want to get anything done
> on a large number of servers all at once (and hopefully even from one
> remote machine), you absolutely cannot beat a command line.  Sorry,
> Ilan, but you just can't.  Please feel free to try to persuade us
> differently, but we're coming from different directions (and no, I don't
> mean people who use computers vs people who don't, or smart people vs
> whatever you want to call them, or normal users vs. power users, etc..).
> You might as well get used to the fact that the command line is never
> going away, just like written e-mail, or written books.  It will
> never happen, period.

I think (well, actually I know) that for a number of years the Macintosh OS
lacked a command line.  So it did go away on at least one platform for a
while. ;-)  

I also believe that symbian, pocketpc 2000 and up, palm and other OS's lack
a command line as well.

As far as the current state of affairs for mainstream OSs, Unix (and Linux)
are now the only OS's that can run entirely without a GUI.  All the other
OSs (Windows, Mac, etc) now use the GUI and tie so much into the GUI that it
is impossible to run without it for anything but the most basic functions.