Open a terminal and you have access to software that started life in the ’70s Unix era. We’ll cover Emacs later but that alone dates back to 1976 – though the first open source GNU Emacs wasn’t until 1985 – so you have some idea what we’re talking about. While all Unix-like terminal commands have their root in the early ’70s –
Grep was released in 1973 with v4 Unix – GNU Grep isn’t mentioned until Jan 1987 (www.gnu.org/bulletins/ bull2.txt) alongside ls, make, ld and tar. Initially the GNU GPL implementation of the base Unix commands were bundled as fileutils but are now in the GNU Core Utilities.