How can I open the Terminal on an iMac G3 (Mac OS 8.5)

Question

Is there even a Terminal? I can't seem to find one anywhere in Applications or Utilities.

Answer 1

Not completely correct. They had a console environment, the MPW Shell (or Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop Shell), which was very nicely done, with screen editing features combined with terminal features. Fun fact, it distinguished Return and Enter keys. One was used as newline, the other to execute the line. It came with both compilers and common command line tools

Answer 2

Before Mac OS X, Mac OS wasn't even Unix based. Steve Jobs liked things simple and easy, so much so that he forced it on users, instead of giving them the option for advanced or simple. (This still happens with things like iOS, but I won't get into that.)

Mac OS 9 and below DOES NOT have a terminal. Even if it did, it would probably have its own special set of commands, as, like I said before, Classic is not Unix-based like OS X. Classic also didn't have a true filesystem. I believe HFS was introduced some time with OS 7, but even then the OS did a lot of the sorting. Even with a limited filesystem, it was nothing like Unix's filesystem, so there would be none of the files you might expect.

I believe that the only reason OS X has a terminal is because the CLI environment is native to Unix, and there was pressure from consumers to include a terminal. The only reason the terminal is usable is because OS X is a Unix OS and takes much of its CLI tools from its base.

Answer 3

There is no terminal, Mac OS 8.5 [& in fact all the way from 1 - 9] is not unix-based at all.

The Unix/BSD/Darwin kernel & its attendant Terminal came with Apple's transition to OS X [Mac OS X as it was originally known, macOS as it will be known from later 2016]

From Wikipedia: OS X

OS X is based on technologies developed at NeXT between the second half of the 1980s and Apple's purchase of the company in late 1996.
OS X's core is a POSIX compliant operating system built on top of the XNU kernel, with standard Unix facilities available from the command line interface. Apple has released this family of software as a free and open source operating system named Darwin.