A terminal is at the end of an electric wire, a shell is the home of a turtle, tty is a strange abbreviation and a console is a kind of cabinet. Well, etymologically speaking, anyway. In Unix terminology, the short answer is that terminal = tty = text input/output environment console = physical terminal shell = command line interpreter Console, terminal and tty are closely related. Originally, they meant a piece of equipment through which you could interact with a computer: In the early days of ...