While pretty short, this is a pretty good sandbox for exploring this type of system. As you said during development, you needed to strike a balance between historical realism and freedom to explore, and going in blind I did find myself just wandering around trying things, which I really liked. I'd imagine playing a more fleshed-out version of this game would be really fun.
The only suggestion I'd give is that I think it might work better as a unix-only game: I could imagine that one could set up a sandboxed shell environment with an entire filesystem to explore, and then you would be able to take advantage of commands that are already implemented by the user's operating system (ls, cat, grep, man, etc.), as well as shell features like tab completion (yeah, probably not historically accurate) and history. In particular, the ability to "ls -R" during the time when I was pretty lost at the second part would have been nice, as would a more fleshed-out manual system (explaining where log files are, for example). The fact that history was preserved between different servers, and didn't care about which user I was logged in as, was also confusing (...and also having the ability to log in as different people was pretty funny).