How I Got A Command Line Prompt On My Android Phone

I rooted my phone before downloading a terminal emulator. This is an important step, because Android phones are setup to restrict what you can do with them; e.g., they won't let you access the command line, like I'm doing in the above video. As I state in the video, Android has at it's heart the Linux OS kernel, which supports a command line interface. However, when Android boots up you are a "Guest" user (the Windows term for a user with very limited privileges). The process of rooting your phone is to allow you to boot up as "root"; root is the "super user" on the Linux kernel (like "Administrator" on Windows). root has no limitations (in practical terms) so you can access the command line, and an app that creates a command line interface will then run on your Android phone. To learn more about rooting your Android phone, google the phrase "root your android phone" and you'll get a bucnch of hits to web pages that describe what rooting is in more detail then I have here, how tos, etc.

I just showed this video to my wife, and she said I should've said, "...the way we used to look, not the way we look.". That picture of me and my wife is from 1999, so we don't look like that today. I ended the video with a recent picture of me and my dog; I do look like that today.