Yep I failed at 'the first 30 seconds' -- didn't do anywhere near enough to ease people in.
Ironically I deliberately made the early servers (and your local terminal) have very few binaries to try and keep it simpler to get started. If you continue past the first 2-3 missions you get to servers that have a lot richer - e.g. file system with /home, /bin, etc and a BASH shell.
I think three big improvements would be: 1. change 'terminal' so it immediately starts with a popup of 'enter hostname to connect to', and 2. make the first 30 seconds much more hand-held, and 3. give more indication that you will unlock richer servers later.
(+4: add even more richness to the later servers. Currently they only have a filesystem and basic file-append, file-read, file-copy commands).