By Prashant Singh My affair with computing started with an IBM PC running MS DOS. I still remember the seductive appeal of a blinking “C” prompt. It was fascinating: type in the right command and magic happened. Although back then, there was very little you could have done with computer that was of any earthly use. But that didn’t deter some of us. We used to spend hours typing and retyping cryptic commands like DIR, ATTRIB, DEL, COPY (later on Ls-axf, ECHO, WALL, SED, AWK, GREP in Linux). There was something about command line that was fascinating. Something, which for some reason was missing in the graphical interfaces which succeeded them. I didn’t know it back then but today, thanks to hindsight, I can say that part of the appeal of command line was the fact that it was very raw and it was not for everyone. That was my superpower. I knew how to communicate with computer. You need to understand that at that age, I couldn’t have said the same about rest of the things, which were also appealing to me. In the years that followed, technology quickly evolved from MS DOS to Windows to Browser to Smartphones to Tablet to Wearable and now with IoT, we are talking about putting computing in practically everything. One would assume that the command line would be nothing more than a faint blip in the rear view mirror. Well you can’t be further away from the truth. The Shift: As I…
