# The terminal ## Here we are! That's peak 90s. It will eventually load. Coffee time. It's loading. And then... ### Good luck! ## Thanks Thanks to [© 2011-2026 Fabrice Bellard](https://bellard.org) An incredible feat. Pure Javascript, at least originally. The first of its kind. By all means, go to the site, it is much, much faster than the poor inclusion I made. It is a real Linux. ``` ls cat readme.txt ``` With WASM, assembly in Javascript, faster emerged like [copy.sh](https://copy.sh/v86/). But that's him I wanted. Bellard is one of the greatest hackers alive. Next time you watch a video on... on everything, really. Youtube, tiktok, vlc, whatever it uses ffmpeg. And he started that. The guy is so awesome that his wikipedia page does not even mention JSLinux. ## Conclusion That is the 90s Linux experience™ ### No, no, I am joking. So there is a very strong image of The Terminal in Cyberpunk. But it is not really a Cyberpunk thing, initially. First, what is a terminal? It is an interface in text that allows to execute commands, read or write text. It is like now you use Windows or better, you open files, you start a browser. Well, at a time, that is how you would do. Because you have no mouse and no icons. Nothing really visual. Generally terminals had a black background so that the beam only works in one color on the text. And that is in fact quite ancient. It is before Linux in the 90s. Before the first UNIX that inspired it. It is before UNIX, freaking Bell Lab's Ritchie's C and UNIX in 1969 that started so much. Way before the IBM AIX, an important commercial success in 1984. ![Ritchie](linux/Ritchie.jpeg) ![Unix](linux/unix.jpeg) It is at the latest the Video Terminal in the early 70s. Like the emblematic DEC VT100. A marvel! ![VT100](linux/vt100.jpeg) But in fact we can really trace back to the teleprinters in the 1950s. Here an IBM. I may or may not have worked for them. ![teleprinter](linux/teleprinter.jpeg) And it is not a stretch, it is really connected to a mainframe, with command execution. In fact, all the terminal vocabulary like CR (carriage return), LF (line feed) comes from it being a typewriter... On Linux, the current terminal is a process, /dev/tty. tty for TeleTYpe. You can't stop it. And boy they hack at that time. Because at that time, it is all trust-based. In big companies, in University. You don't have viruses. You don't have encryption almost. We trust people. There is no DRM almost, firmware are open for change. This is what started the Open Source in fact : not a novelty, a return to the original state of freedom. Anyway you had terminal before almost everything, before any Operating System per se, even before screens were used. And that is what a terminal was, the normal, in fact only way to use a computer. Including for a small population for hacking. And so the image of the terminal was such that the first movie example I know of a terminal is THX 1138, yep the one that gave you sound. So in the George Lucas movie about oppression you already see the black screen, lines of text. But the real game changer was WarGames in 1983. It really showed the world "hacking in a terminal", before most people had a computer at home. Or a smartphone. Yeah, times were hard. I had a Game & Watch though. Blade Runner and Neuromancer are really what started Cyberpunks even if there is an history. They come respectively in 1982 and 1984. And Blade Runner does not figure a terminal as a hacking device or something fancy. And a movie like Alien in 1979 maybe, already shows something more advanced than a terminal of that time. Meaning that there is something that conflated the image of the 80s of what hacking is, with the Cyberpunk. The 80s was in part cyberpunk (along others Aliens, Terminator, Star Wars, etc.), in part the 80s' way of hacking. Add to that a certain nostalgia, and in some young people an attraction to this kind of tech, seen as "no bullshit". And voila! The Cyberpunk Terminal was born. I use terminals almost daily. It is not a big deal. It is like using Excel or anything. You get used to it. My lil prompt. ``` ▄ OS: Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie) x86_64 ▄▄▄▄▄ Kernel: Linux 6.12.90+deb13.1-amd64 ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄ Uptime: 2h 17m ▗ ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄ ▖ Terminal: alacritty ▄▄▄ ▄▄▄▄▄ ▄▄▄ Shell: zsh 5.9 ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄ ▄ ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄ DE: Cinnamon 6.4.10 ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄ ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄ Mobo: MAG B650M Mortar ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄ ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄ CPU: Ryzen 9 7950X3D @ 5.7GHz [58.1°C] ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄ ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄ Memory: 12815MiB / 31692MiB (40%) Disk (/): 1.7T / 1.8T (98%) C Y B E R D Y N E GPU: GeForce RTX 3080 SYSTEMS Some kids pee their name in snow. Chuck Norris pees his name in concrete. ➜ ~ ```