The first time I saw someone use a terminal to control a remote computer, I didn’t understand what I was watching.
I was a student at the University of Akron. An IT support guy sat down, opened a window, and typed something. Then he was somewhere else. Not metaphorically. He was executing commands on a different machine, in real time, through a protocol called telnet. I had grown up with Apple IIe computers and Windows desktops. Every computer I had ever used was the computer sitting in front of me. The idea that a keyboard and a blinking cursor could reach through a wire and touch another machine was, genuinely, one of the most surprising things I had ever seen.
That moment rewired something in my brain. The terminal was not just an interface. It was a portal.
But, I had no remote machines to connect to, so I had to start with something a lot less glamorous. I installed Linux on a laptop in my bedroom and started learning by typing commands on a local system. This was dial-up internet, so every time I needed to call my friend Chad for help, I had to disconnect, pick up the phone, ask my question, hang up, reconnect, and try again. Over and over. The commands were terse and unforgiving. A misplaced flag could wreck your evening. There was no Stack Overflow. There was Chad, and the man pages, and stubbornness. I spent a couple of years in that mode, grinding through the brutality of learning Unix on a single machine, knowing that somewhere out there people were reaching through wires to touch other computers. Dreaming…
Years later, I was a Linux administrator at NASA. The machines I logged into had 32 processors. The clusters had 500 nodes. I would SSH into systems that could model fluid dynamics, crunch satellite telemetry, and simulate things no desktop could touch. The feeling was the same as that first telnet session, just scaled up. I was sitting at a desk in an office, but my hands were on the controls of something enormous.
Then I moved to American Greetings, where I managed 1500 Linux servers. This was a different kind of power. Not the raw computational force of a NASA cluster, but the operational complexity of a fleet. I ran mass SSH commands across hundreds of machines at once and learned something you can only learn through repetition: the heuristics of how commands succeed and fail at scale. You develop an intuition for which servers will timeout, which ones will throw unexpected errors, and what a healthy response pattern looks like when 1500 machines answer back. You stop thinking about individual computers. You start thinking in systems.
Each of these stages felt like the terminal was getting bigger. Reaching further. Connecting me to more.
But all of it was still, fundamentally, about Linux servers. I was typing commands that executed on operating systems. The universe of the terminal was the universe of Unix: files, processes, network sockets, and package managers. Powerful, yes. Vast, compared to that first virtual terminal. But bounded.
Claude Code broke that boundary.
When I sit at my terminal now, I am not just controlling Linux servers. I am writing code, drafting blog posts, managing OKRs, scheduling social media posts, querying Jira tickets, checking DNS records, monitoring Zabbix infrastructure, and searching my own memories saved in Claude’s memory MCP server. Not through a web browser with seventeen tabs. Through a command line. Through a conversation.
The technology that makes this possible is called MCP, the Model Context Protocol. It is a standard that lets AI assistants connect to external tools and services. Each MCP server is a bridge between the terminal and some piece of the digital world. I have servers connected to WordPress, Cloudflare, Google Workspace, Jira, Zabbix, and a persistent memory system. When I type at my terminal, I am not just talking to a machine in front of me or even a machine across the wire. I am talking to a system that can reach into dozens of services simultaneously and act on my behalf.
This is the thing that feels different from every previous iteration. Telnet and SSH let me reach one remote machine. Mass SSH let me operate at fleet scale. But all of those connections were me giving instructions to operating systems. The terminal was a window into Unix.
Now the terminal is a window into everything.
The pattern is the same one I recognized at the University of Akron: a blinking cursor that reaches through a wire and touches something on the other side. But “the other side” is no longer a single server or a cluster or a fleet. It is the entire digital infrastructure of my professional and personal life. My calendar. My documents. My monitoring systems. My publishing platforms. My code repositories. All of it accessible from the same place I learned to type ls twenty-five years ago.
And it’s not just about how far you can reach into the universe. It’s about how deep. Want to reverse engineer an undocumented API? No problem. Want to submit a PR for a highly technical piece of code written in a language you’re not fluent in? No problem. Want to reverse engineer a proprietary protocol on top of Bluetooth? Never done that before, let’s try. Imposter syndrome fades away. Everyone is a developer and sysadmin now. Skills in specific programming languages or APIs are no longer a blocker to getting things done, to contributing to the universe.
There is something philosophically interesting about the fact that the interface did not change. It’s still a terminal. Still text in, text out. The paradigm that felt primitive to GUI enthusiasts in the 1990s turned out to be the most extensible, composable, and durable interface ever built. Graphical interfaces fragment your attention across applications. I’m also experimenting with voice input/output, but the terminal consolidates everything into a single point of focus. It feels timeless, classic, vintage, cool.
I don’t think most people have processed what this means yet. The command line is no longer a tool for sysadmins and developers. It is a terminal to the universe. Every API, every service, every system that can be reached through a protocol can be reached through a conversation in a terminal window. Even things like modern exercise bikes, home devices, and other smart hardware can be touched now with this new ability.
That IT guy at the University of Akron probably forgot about that telnet session five minutes after he closed the window. For me, it was the start of a thread that I’ve been pulling on for twenty-five years. The terminal keeps getting bigger…