johnbee said:
I would like to add a comment to this thread. It is not actually correct
that
the black screen that one gets when entering cmd or command in the run
box is an emulator. The purpose of it is to enter command mode. In
command mode you can do all sorts of things easily which can't be done
otherwise. Not so long ago it even got into the national press, in the
form
of mention of the Ping command.
Have a look at the help section on command-line reference for
IT pros. It is essential for people writing systems and also
administrators, and
can be useful for normal users who are interested in for example what
their
IP address is and whether they can change it - which they might want to do
for various reasons, and what their MAC settings are.
For myself, when a man comes on who uses commands I would be a bit
wary of taking the piss because he calls it the DOS prompt.
Technically you are correct, the command line is/was used for many different
OS's like Basic, Python, LISP, DOS, UNIX, Cisco and many others before the
GUI"s (Graphical User Interface ie Windows) came about. There were a lot of
different commands, including Ping, some were OS specific and others would
translate to other OS's, some were similar enough to be the same.
But, in this case the commands he wants to use are related to DOS rather
than one of the other computer languages or OS's. In response to the
emulator part of your post, "a terminal emulator, terminal application,
term, or tty for short, is a program that emulates a "dumb" video terminal
within some other display architecture. Though typically synonymous with a
command line shell or text terminal, the term terminal covers all remote
terminals, including graphical interfaces. A terminal emulator inside a
graphical user interface is often called a terminal window." --wikipedia.org
Basically, it's 12 inches or 1 foot, it's still a command line window.
HTH,
Dave
