It's worth considering what about command line interfaces makes them useful, who they are useful for and whether Mac OS offered an analogous interface somehow t

It's worth considering what about command line interfaces makes them useful, who they are useful for and whether Mac OS offered an analogous interface somehow that fit the bill for their users. For me, the main gain of using a shell is that you can easily automate and document workflows. Apple added this to System 7 with AppleScript, to some extent. I haven't used AppleScript, so I have no idea of how successful it was to this end, but it does seem to cover some surface that would traditionally be in the domain of a command line shell. Apple released their GUI operating system to consumers before most competitors had anything like it. Rough contemporaries in the GUI consumer OS space, in the mid-80s through the 90s almost all had some kind of command line interface. The addition of AppleScript was probably a response to this, while trying to stay true to Jobs' and Raskin's idea of the Macintosh as a "computer appliance".