This isn't especially surprising, I probably learned to use command line when I wasn't much older. That wasn't because I was some genius, just that this was the only way to use a computer at the time.
There seems to be a popular misconception that a command line interface represents some kind of advanced brain surgery when in fact for many tasks it's simply easier.
I have done tech support jobs a few times in my life and it's a lot easier to guide someone in using a command line than it is a GUI "Click on Edit , click on Tools , Click the "advanced" tab , right click on the picture of a gear, now drag this thing into that place on the left" vs "type this in exactly how I dictate it".
Also CLI tends to be more predictable, I've seen so many people's computers where they've accidentally dragged interface elements all over the place and have no idea how to find anything.
I was doing Basic programming on the TRS-80 at about the age of 3. It's really not hard to learn how to string a few PRINT and GOTO lines together, and I think it's a great thing to teach kids to do.
> Also CLI tends to be more predictable
Generally I think that's true, but when learning Linux I managed to bork the system so badly using the command line so many times, that I just had to reinstall the whole OS.
I think it's great that you broke the system so badly. You then got to fix it, and you also learned that you have the ability to fix it even when it's terribly broken.
Ultimately, if you don't have the ability to break things, you don't truly have the ability to experiment and discover.
As a young child Dad let me use his XT when he wasnt working. I'd tinker and change settings to see what they did. Occasionally I'd break something and would sweat it out to find a fix before Dad found out. It was a good motivator.
Assuming he did fix it. I remember the time I had some annoyances with my boot loader. After several tries at fixing it, I thought "I should get a clean start, lets dd zeros to mbr!". I did recover from that but it took so much time I didn't want to ever go through anything like it again.
I never recovered from losing a truecrypt password once.
Linux from scratch taught me that Linux is magic, and that if you deviate the slightest amount from the instructions, or try to customize anything, you are in for a world of pain.
The C64 was great for that too, in a different way. You could do absolutely anything, mess it up in any way - peek and poke random system stuff - and you were one reset away from it being fine again.
I really miss this behaviour of 8bit era. I guess that things get soo complicated today and advanced information are soo easy to find that this state is not possible to achieve anymore. You can screw up even a smartphone by "poking" around too much.
I was booting and operating my father's Apple IIe at 4 by myself and I don't consider myself exceptional, but rather having experienced exceptional circumstances.
The year was 1985. Against his hierarchy decision, my father bought one for work under cover of some big carbon paper order (that was used a lot at the time, so it really did go unnoticed) and hid it at home.
Bundled with the computer were two floppies with games, one with a rabbit in a maze and the other I can't remember. He booted them for me a few times. Then one day as he was gone at the office, I booted the thing on the DOS floppy, inserted the rabbit game floppy and started the game. I was caught red-handed when he came back. Boy was he angry (what if I screwed up and destroyed weeks of work?). It's actually the first time I can remember being scolded. Later when he cooled down and realized I could actually get it, he briefly showed me more things like LOGO and BASIC, which I enjoyed a lot. He did not know much on the programming front (he was more of a MultiPlan and WordPerfect user) so I was on my own on that front. I remember creating chains of GOTO to generate infinite loops on purpose, and genuinely trying to understand and build very crude purposeless but exploratory programs. Yet at that age and completely by yourself you really can't do much.
Then, less than a year later the computer gained its due recognition and went at the office, at about the same time we moved far away. I was not to touch a computer again for eight long years.
At after school care when I was in kindergarten, they had computers that would play Oregon Trail, which you had to launch from the command line. There were post-it notes with instructions for how to do it. We did it. All of us. It wasn't rocket science.
We all did, there were GUIs available at the time (Win 3.1) but most good games ran from a command line interface, you could get quite a long way just understanding the "dir" and "cd" commands.
The biggest thing stopping people from using computers at that point in time seemed to be how expensive they were rather than that we had difficultly getting them to work.
Sure but that isn't learning the fundamentals which seems to be the basic goal of the OP.
I too could use the command line at a young age with the most basic things. I could even program a little back then. But I wasn't learning the fundamentals that way.
As far as I'm aware there isn't some universally recognized "right" way to teach people how to use computers. I remember 10 years ago everyone was certain that teaching kids to use MS Word was the most important thing in the world, now it seems to be avoiding creeps on facebook.
I'd be thrilled that they are actually learning something, especially something designed for "grown ups" rather than kids.
I am simply reacting and commententing to the overall theme of the comments and the OP's essay which is I read as him teaching his kids the fundamentals by playing around with non-GUI interfaces.
I remember using a Commodore 64 when I was 3. We had a book of BASIC programs that had to be typed in every time you wanted to run them, or you could store them on a cassette tape.
It's about time I start teaching my 3 year old daughter how to program a computer; hopefully she hasn't been too badly spoiled by the iPad.
There seems to be a popular misconception that a command line interface represents some kind of advanced brain surgery when in fact for many tasks it's simply easier.
I have done tech support jobs a few times in my life and it's a lot easier to guide someone in using a command line than it is a GUI "Click on Edit , click on Tools , Click the "advanced" tab , right click on the picture of a gear, now drag this thing into that place on the left" vs "type this in exactly how I dictate it".
Also CLI tends to be more predictable, I've seen so many people's computers where they've accidentally dragged interface elements all over the place and have no idea how to find anything.