Apple used to have a function in macs with FireWire, where if you had T pressed down on the keyboard while booting, the computer booted into a mode where you could use it as a FireWire external hard drive. An insanely useful feature, for migrating files off old machines, installing OS onto a machine without a functional optical drive, quickly stealing your friend’s hard drive contents etc.

It’s a shame it didn’t really take off as a more common feature. It would be a useful feature in so many situations, nowadays the closest I can get to it is a custom USB stick with a linux distro that tries to discover all volumes and expose them as network drives, but it’s a lot more complicated to use than just having something you plug in and it simply works. I’d love it if they did a similar thing with thunderbolt, but as far as I know it’s no longer an option.

That would be the dream indeed. It’s so fluid after you learn it. Other networking equipment often has good configuration CLIs as well (like juniper and vyos), but Cisco is probably the best in my experience. It’s also nice how consistent they are across generations.

You can get about as close as it’s possible in a normal operating system with zsh and plugins like zsh-autocomplete. Bash tries to pick up the possible alternatives from context as well (with tab suggestions) that act somewhat like ? on Cisco CLI, but implementing it is left up to the command itself to provide for the shell. Many commands luckily provide very robust autocompletion to bash out-of-the-box, especially if installed via the system package manager.

Unfortunately we’ll probably never reach the point of actual configuration CLIs since they only have a set amount of commands that are developed by the same company. It would be close to impossible to achieve the same level of standardisation for a general operating system, as we don’t know the entire configuration of the system and there are multiple incompatible flag schemes. (As styles go, things like dd and ffmpeg throw a wrench in the works with their non-standard flags)

I’d say it’s a lukewarm take at best. A million dollar company is something like a small (<10 people) consulting agency or a couple hot dog stands in a relatively busy area. So like you said, nothing exceptional.

Leaving out self-employed individuals and 2-3 person hair salons and the like, a million dollar revenue is not really something difficult to reach. Especially if you include things like retail, where moving any inventory increases revenue a lot. Even for companies outside retail, when keeping in mind how much one is able to bill for things like trades in the US, revenue increases quite quickly.

Brings to mind this bit from Tom Scott