You open Windows 11, right-click the Start menu, and you see: Command Prompt, PowerShell, Windows Terminal. Three things. You just wanted to run a quick command. Now you’re questioning your life choices.
This confusion is real, and honestly, Microsoft did not make it easy. But there’s a genuinely good reason PowerShell exists — and once you understand it, the whole picture starts to make sense.
CMD Was Never Really a Shell — It Was a Stopgap Let’s start at the beginning. cmd.exe — the Command Prompt — has been around since Windows NT launched in December 1987 [1]. Before that, COMMAND.COM handled things in MS-DOS. So yeah, Windows has had a command-line interface for nearly 40 years.
I type ls, cd, and grep probably a few hundred times a day. Never once, in 8+ years of doing this, did I stop to wonder where these tiny two-and-three letter words actually came from. Turns out, almost every single one of them has a story — some guy at Bell Labs in the early 1970s, working on a machine slower than your smartwatch, solving a problem he had that exact day. Let’s go through ten of the most-used Unix commands and dig into why they exist.