The Command Line A Humble Journey
summary
Traceable lineage from 1800s batteries and telegraphs to today’s terminal: claims include that Morse simplified telegraphy to one wire, Donald Murray introduces CR and LF and ITA2 later supplanted by ASCII, teletypes become the TTY ancestors of modern shells, Multics gives run com → rc files and the term “shell,” Glenda Schroeder implements the first multiuser shell, and Unix rewrites shells in C. Demo examples: Altair + BASIC sparks hobbyist software and Microsoft; Windows 95 keeps GUI atop DOS. The command line ends up as an app that talks point‑to‑point to the machine.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction to CLI
- 1:45Early communication methods
- 8:50Telegraph and Morse code
- 16:24Teletype machines
- 20:17Punch cards and IBM
- 26:39Computer terminals
- 30:11Unix and Multics
- 33:01Home computers and hobbyists
- 35:08Graphical interfaces
- 37:13Modern CLI today
- 38:18Future of CLI and innovation
- 41:14Tin can telephone demo
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