1. The operator's station of a
mainframe. In times past,
this was a privileged location that conveyed godlike powers to
anyone with fingers on its keys. Under
Unix and other
guarded by passwords instead, and the console is just the
tty the system was booted from. Some of the mystique
remains, however, and it is traditional for
sysadmins to
post urgent messages to all users from the console (on Unix,
/dev/console).
keyboard (as opposed to character-only terminals talking to a
graphics or run
X. See also
CTY.