The thing that caught my attention (and nobody else has commented on) is that things we take for granted, most notably a command-line interface, is something that had to be invented.¹ A big part of my first job (at the UIC computing center in the mid-80s) was helping people figure out what was wrong with their JCL jobs they were sending to the MVS half of our IBM mainframe which had a command line (TSO) but which was an unpleasant thing to work with, especially compared to the CMS side of the mainframe which even had nice screen-based interactions. It’s a bit startling to realize that I’m older than the command line.
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1. Similarly, the idea of arranging the words in a dictionary by alphabetical order was something that only happened for the first time sometime around the 15th century (plus or minus a century maybe?) if I recall correctly. It seems obvious now, but why not arrange the words by, e.g., what sort of thing they’re about? After all, perhaps what you want from a dictionary is not to find out what a word means, but to find the right word to describe what you want to write about.
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1. Similarly, the idea of arranging the words in a dictionary by alphabetical order was something that only happened for the first time sometime around the 15th century (plus or minus a century maybe?) if I recall correctly. It seems obvious now, but why not arrange the words by, e.g., what sort of thing they’re about? After all, perhaps what you want from a dictionary is not to find out what a word means, but to find the right word to describe what you want to write about.