Basically, mount points are places that point to a file system, be it a partition on your hard drive, a floppy/CD drive, or even another computer. It's designed to seamlessl integrate with the directory structure. For example, in Windows, if you want to have a network drive available, you need to assign it a drive letter. Say Windows gives it E: . All your MP3s are on this network drive, so E: makes no sense. In *nix, you can mount it anywhere you want, so you could make a folder named /mp3s and mount the network drive there, and whenever you go to that folder it actually goes to the drive across the network. Also, if I add a Zip drive for example in Windows it will again give it a letter, like G: . In Linux, you can have it be at /zipdrive or wherever, and whenever you copy files to the /zipdrive folder, they go on the zip disk in the drive. So that's what mounting is for and what it does. Before you can use a disk or some hardware, you need to give it a place that points to it that you can use in the file system. AFAIK, Windows does it too, it's just automatic so you can't see it happening.
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