[Beltalowda]

You don't need to "step through 40 years of organic development" unless you want super-fancy things like an interactive TUI with mouse support or whatnot (and even then, it's not that hard). For most regular CLIs you need a few control codes which are pretty much universal today (setting text attributes, clear line) and that's it.

CLI apps are probably the easiest applications that accept user input to make. Compared to GUI or web apps the amount of knowledge you need is almost trivial.