Remote Login

• The idea of "remote login", as opposed to "local login" is significant in the history of computing -- originally, a user "logged in" at a basic display terminal which was directly connected to a hardware port on a multi-user host computer.
   
  
• If the host was connected to a network, remote login allowed users to log in to other networked hosts over the network as though their terminal was directly connected. Either way, the idea of "logging in" is still based on getting a command line shell on the target system. On our Unix systems, we nowadays talk about a shell window, which performs this function.
   
  
• Some systems do not (even now) support remote login, in most cases because they don't support a decent "command-line" interface.
   
  
• Different operating systems have (or used to have... ) quite different procedures for handling local logins, making the problem of providing a generic remote login facility (potentially) quite complicated.