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.