The ISS computer is performing many activities at any given moment, and generally these activities must be controlled and monitored from one of a few types of windows. The sections below describe the three main types of these windows. Some of the windows are opened by choosing a menu entry from the Iconbar, others are opened by double clicking on the appropriate icon, usually found in the upper left of the screen.
These are windows that are used for plotting data. They are opened and closed using theDISPLAY icon on the Iconbar window. Pressing on the DISPLAY icon will give you a menu of possible graphics displays. There is also an entry labelled blank which will remove all the graphics windows from the screen.
Most of the programs running in the background on the ISS workstation do not deal with plotting data. Instead, they control important functions like archiving data onto removable disk or tape (recall the archiver icon mentioned earlier). Others provide valuable feedback on the status of the system and possible problems, such as the EventLogger program. The data store inventory program, available by choosing the data store inventory entry from the DATA menu on the Iconbar, provides a graphical list of the data platforms and files stored in the system.
These windows are used for entering commands to run on the system. Some commands run programs which have a window and graphical interfaces, but many commands do not use a window and instead print their output in the terminal window and expect their input from the terminal window also. These windows go by all three names, command, terminal, and shell, and sometimes by combinations of the three. The shell is just another program which interprets and runs the commands which are typed into it, so any window by any of the three names ultimately uses a shell to run commands. See UNIX Basics for more information on typing commands into the system.