[ Thanks to Newsmaster for this link.
]
“A small opinion poll of people with no particular knowledge of
computer science revealed that most of them associated the
operating system with the graphical interface. But, even more, to
some of them the graphical interface was the system itself.”
“The reason for this misunderstanding is easy to find: among all
of the complex tasks an operating system gets through, the one that
stands out the most to the majority of people is the GUI (Graphical
User Interface). In a sense, the better a system is, the more
hidden its complexity is.”
“The operating system, really, is made of several components,
from the most obvious to the most hidden, but they all rest on a
single basic element: the kernel.”
“The kernel is so important that, in some environments –
particularly academic ones – the study of operating systems is
limited to the kernel. Linux, which is known to everybody as a set
of programs and interfaces, was actually born as a “single” kernel.
The founder of the Free Software Foundation and the reputed father
of the GNU project, Richard Stallman, stresses that the system
known as Linux should more properly be called GNU/Linux.“