[X Newbies] Saving Mail and Other Program Data

[Alex]

On Thursday, Apr 22, 2004, at 21:41 Canada/Eastern, Al Poulin wrote:

> [...] Our familiarity with the OS 9 model affects our approach to OS 
> X.[...]

An almost certain recipe for trouble.

Mac OS X is _not_ Mac OS 9. It's a completely different operating 
system (its proper name should have been probably something like 
OpenStep v5), onto which were grafted certain elements of the "classic" 
Mac OS. If you want to be productive in it, you must learn it as it is, 
not as your experience tells you it should be. Read, mark, and inwardly 
digest a good book (e.g., Pogue's), and go on from there.

> [...] (Rant on -- I keep wondering why must there be a Terminal 
> Application?
> Command Language?  It reminds me of MS-DOS which I avoided like the 
> plague.
> Just rhetorical, no need to answer. Rant off.)

Rhetorical, my foot. Of course you know that's the one question you'll 
get most answers for. I'll try to give you a slightly different one.

Think of Mac OS X as a cruise ship. Deep in the bowels there's the 
engine, the core without which the ship is just a hunk of metal. On X, 
that's the Mach kernel. Next, there're all the shafts and cranks and 
machinery around the engine that transmit the power to the propeller, 
supply it with fuel, generate the electricity to run everything else on 
the ship -- that's the BSD subsystem, or the "Unix" part of the Mac. 
Together, and with a few other bits and pieces, they form Darwin, the 
OS X ship's power plant. (Incidentally, Darwin is free, and can also be 
installed on other machines than Macs). Relying on all that is the 
graphics subsystem (Quartz, QuickTime, etc.) and the application 
subsystem (Cocoa, Java, etc.). That's the ship's crew -- they make the 
ship run, and you see them here and there, but you don't have much 
direct interaction with them. And, on top of it all, there's Aqua, the 
graphical user interface -- that's the captain and the purser and the 
stewards, all dressed in spiffy uniforms, speaking your language and 
offering to carry out your slightest wish.

Now, some people are perfectly happy with that. They want something, 
they tell the purser, and the purser tells the steward, and the steward 
tells the crewman, etc., and eventually they get what they want. Other 
people prefer a more direct way. They speak the language, they know the 
proper word for every crank, shaft, knob, or button, so they go 
directly to the mechanic who runs the powerplant and tell him precisely 
what to do. In other words, they use the Terminal. It's certainly 
faster -- _if_, that is, you do know how to talk to the mechanic -- but 
it can also end up with the ship on the rocks, holed below the 
waterline.

f