Login directly to terminal instead of GUI First: I'm obviously not talking about logging in and then automatically launching Terminal.app.

In older versions of Mac OS X, you used to be able to type &gt;console in the username field on the login screen and go directly into a command line terminal session.

I haven't done it in years until the other day. However, now, when I try it, my computer just locks up. I can't cancel, and it never sends me to a terminal session.

Is it even possible to do this anymore? If not, does anybody know when it was removed? It seems odd that typing &gt;console would cause the machine to lock up if it wasn't recognizing it in some way.
If you find >console not working, newer OS have disabled it by default. 

A quick command line modification of the preference will re-enable it:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist "DisableConsoleAccess" NO