How was a shell like when operating systems didn't had a GUI? [closed]

Question

I understand the concepts of terminal, console, shell and their differences. I know a shell today is an interpreter that communicates with the OS kernel to perform some actions and does it through terminal applications.

But in the old days when computers didn't had GUI, all the interaction a user had with a computer was through the shell?

I've read that the Bourne Shell (sh) was introduced in Unix version 7, was that like, you turn on the computer and from the moment you start typing you are communicating with sh? or you had to enter the sh program through a command and then that shell starts?

And kind of the same with windows or Mac, is that MS-DOS functionality what we have today in cmd?

Thanks in advance and if someone can leave a documentation where this evolution is explained I'll be very grateful.

Answer 1

Not "the old days" — we still use computers without GUIs, because we have servers, embedded systems, and even some folks who prefer to have no graphical environment on their home workstations.

When you start up your computer, or SSH in, or whatever: yes, you're greeted with $ (or a login prompt first, depending). It's mostly the same as using the terminal emulator in fullscreen. The Mac runtime is based on BSD, so also similar to older Unix systems. Many of the tools on Unix-like systems today are also very similar to those in use 30+ years ago, and some haven't seen anything but security patches in a long long time.

cmd.exe isn't exactly the same as a DOS workstation, but it's the same kind of feel. You could also try this out for yourself by finding a good DOS emulator. For Unix-like systems, you could get a VPS on any of the providers for an hour or so just to experiment, or start a new vTTY if you're on Linux.

There were less programs, you won't find Ruby or Node on SysV, and some tools have changed, but if you're already comfortable using the terminal on a modern computer, you wouldn't have many problems using a text-only system, and only a few getting using an older Unix system (especially if you're used to GNU tools).

You can also run older versions of Unix in VMs or emulators, of course. For example this answer has links for running V7 in VirtualBox, and a quick search in your preferred search engine will probably turn up instructions and images for other older OSs.