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by murukesh_s 2917 days ago
I don't know it personally, but having seen his technical abilities from demo videos, he definitely is capable of using UNIX CLI, in fact I do believe he can write programs if he wanted to. He is not a genius like woz, but a person with an average tech skill like most of us regular programmers, but with an additional marketing genius.
1 comments

I have no doubt he was capable of learning how. But I'm more interested in his perspective... Consider a contemporary-ish reference from Andy Hertzfeld:

"... was running a character-based text editor that I viewed with the typical pious disdain of a Macintosh purist." ( https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor... )

Did Jobs share a similar bias? Did he understand why a small % of the population would want to have access to the command line (The inverse of his "mere mortals" references)? Did he take advantage of the tools provided by using a shell?

>Did he take advantage of the tools provided by using a shell?

For doing what? Filtering log files and running services? He wasn't a sysadmin (and even programmers, aside for their IDE and debugger, mostly use the shell when they wear a sysadmin hat for their own computer).

That said, the first computer Apple built was the Apple I, and II -- which only had a command line interface.