Type into it
Click the dark panel first or the keys go nowhere. Then help, and work down the list: ls, cd, cat, top, ping, uptime, whoami, uname, history, search, sudo, clear. Tab finishes a filename when there is only one match, and the up arrow walks back through what you typed.
Search prints numbered results with the address underneath. Stripped of layout, a results page turns out to be four lines of text and a timing figure.
Sudo, obviously
Everyone types it. You are told you are not in the sudoers file and that the incident has been reported, which is word for word what a real machine says. Half the people who try it have seen that message in anger, which is the only reason the joke works.
None of this is real
No shell, no server, no disk. Four folders that exist only while the tab is open, and a fake process table for top that reshuffles every second because it looks better that way.
For the opposite kind of stripping back, google in 1998 keeps the layout and drops twenty five years of design instead. The google matrix screen just throws characters at you and asks nothing.
