Typing commands was originally limited by the speed of a teleprinter (before screens became standard), not the quality of the keyboard (QWERTY keyboard was crea

Typing commands was originally limited by the speed of a teleprinter (before screens became standard), not the quality of the keyboard (QWERTY keyboard was created to slow down typists that were so fast they broke typing machines so I'd assume that it already limited typing speed enough). This is also likely where the prompt character comes from, today we can do without it because terminal emulators remember the input and execute it once the current command is done but back then it actually prompted you to start typing. Teleprinters is also where the word 'tty' (there are tty and tty with numbers in /dev that represent virtual terminals and you can play with them a bit if you know how) came from. Hidden files starting with a dot was also a quirk of the ls reimplementation at the time of making filesystem hierarchical that was supposed to hide . and .. (current and parent dirs) but the check it did was for the first character being a dot, thus the concept of 'hidden files' was born. See: https://plus.google.com/+RobPikeTheHuman/posts/R58WgWwN9jp https://plus.google.com/+RobPikeTheHuman/posts/R58WgWwN9jp