The DOS box is dead, long live the DOS box!
Source: ubuntuforums.org
Since I'm a noob myself and don't know much about the inner workings of the terminal, I won't shed any light on that subject. But, I would like to share some interesting and useful terminal code I've found.
Source: martin.ankerl.com
Results: Konsole and gnome-terminal are the fastest, xterm and Command Prompt are the slowest.
Source: phatlip.org
Huge list of helpful command-line commands for Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003. Linux and Mac OSX commands latter this week...