Bash Scripting — Chapter One part 1 | The bash2003 Book

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[ Part One of Five ]
A Short Beginning

Note Before We Begin

This post is not a historical walkthrough.
It’s simply a story-driven explanation to help you better understand what things like the shell, terminal, and Bash actually are — not when or how exactly they appeared.

So… don’t look for perfect chronology here — look for clarity.
Let’s begin.

bash2003, a Simple Book

Hello. This book starts with a very short introduction — short enough that I’ll just tell you about the name.

It’s called bash2003. Why 2003? Because the first version of Bash was released on 08/06/1989, and if you add up those numbers (8+6+1989), you get 2003.
It’s a small tribute to the day Bash was born.

The book has 10 chapters and is written for beginners.

Each post in this series will fully cover a single concept. I won’t stretch topics over multiple posts.

First, I’ll explain the idea, then provide code, examples, and exercises and so on.

The goal of this book is to teach Linux by learning Bash — because I believe it’s more practical that way, I think XD.

Introducing Bash, the Terminal, and the Shell

What is a Shell?

Although this section is titled “Bash, Terminal, and Shell,” we need to understand the concept of the shell before diving into Bash.

Why do I say “minimal”?
Because without trying it out and explaining some deeper concepts later, I can’t offer a full introduction.
That’s the point of writing this book online — to add Bash to our mental toolkit, to learn how to use it, and eventually to understand Linux more clearly.

The Early Days: Talking to Hardware

In the early days, “computers” were machines with physical input/output slots.
To activate a specific feature, you had to plug wires into specific ports.

You were literally speaking to the hardware.

The Rise of Operating Systems

Then came operating systems — software that acted as an intermediary between humans and hardware.

But even with operating systems, communication with computers was still difficult.
You were still interacting with software in binary or technical ways.

So the idea emerged: maybe we need something to help us get even closer to the system.
Something like wearing a disguise — to become one of them.

We needed a shell — a layer or suit that helps us “talk” to our computer in a way it understands.
That’s what the shell does: it receives our commands and tells the OS how to execute them.

This is where the name “shell” comes from — a kind of wrapper that enables communication.

Shells can be graphical (like desktop environments), but the one we’ll focus on is text-based — specifically Bash.

So Bash is a shell — a program that lets us type commands instead of clicking.

The Terminal

Once the shell was developed, we needed hardware to use it. These were called terminals — a keyboard and monitor connected to a central machine.

This way, users could sit at a terminal and use the central computer by sending commands.

Because computers were large and expensive, a company would buy one central system with many terminals so employees could all work on the same machine.

But today, things are different.

Now, every user has a complete PC or laptop. So we no longer need physical terminals.

Instead, we use terminal emulators — software that behaves like the old hardware terminals.

This lets us use text-based shells like Bash inside our personal machines, while preserving the core functionality.
Summary of This Chapter:

All I wanted to say is :

Shell is the interface between us and the OS. It receives our commands and passes them to the system.
Bash is one type of shell — a text-based one.
Terminal was once hardware used to access a shell. Today, we use software terminal emulators for the same purpose.

Exercise

Take a moment to visualize the story of shell, Bash, and terminal (with the help of the Ai generated pic i provided for you).
Try to replay the entire concept mentally using the images and metaphors.