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.