My parents wrote sequences of commands on a piece of paper that told them how to launch various programs. These were usually captured from manuals or from the output of installation processes (launched by following the manual). They had no idea how to figure any of it out on their own. What's "cd"? No clue. How does the filesystem look? How do you figure out where you are and get to where you need to be? Dunno.

The commands were just magic words to make the computer do the thing you wanted.