Google Terminal

A prompt where the search box should be

Violet text on near black inside a chunky clay case, scanlines across the glass, a boot sequence that claims to find 640k of memory. It runs a small set of real commands and refuses everything else with the kind of message a proper shell would give you.

Start with help. Then ls, which lists twelve entries as clickable file names. Then open followed by any of those names, and it takes you there.

Commands worth trying

Echo repeats whatever you feed it, which is only interesting once. Fortune gives you a single line of nonsense. Date reads your actual system clock, so it is the one command here that tells the truth. Matrix prints eight rows of falling characters and then points you at the proper google matrix version.

Sudo anything gets the sudoers refusal, which is the joke every terminal has made since about 1998 and is still funny because of how flat it is delivered. Exit refuses to let you leave.

Arrow keys work

Up and down cycle through your command history the same way a real shell does. Small detail, but typing open gravity, then hitting up twice to fix a typo, is the difference between a toy and something that feels like a terminal.

Where the idea came from

The original was a command line styled search page, part of a wave of interface parodies that also gave us the reversed and tilted versions. Searches for google terminal have never really stopped, mostly from people who want a shell that does not require installing anything.

Similar in spirit

google 1998 is the other page here built around a version of the interface that no longer exists. google mirror and google askew both mess with the layout rather than replacing it. And matrix google is the full screen version of what the matrix command hints at.

Everything is indexed on the google easter eggs page.

One thing it does not do

Nothing here touches your machine. It is a fake shell in a browser, so rm and its friends produce a command not found rather than anything alarming.