Text Terminals
A text terminal, or often just terminal (sometimes text console) is a serial computer interface for text entry and display. Information is presented as an array of pre-selected formed characters. When such devices use a video display such as a cathode-ray tube, they are called a "video display unit" or "visual display unit" (VDU) or "video display terminal" (VDT).
Originally text terminals were electronic computer terminals connected to computers by a serial port, but later computers have built-in system consoles, and terminal emulator programs that work in a graphical desktop environment. Graphical displays have not supplanted the text terminal, nor are they intended to, as the latter is convenient for computer programmers and appropriate for command-line interfaces and text user interfaces; even within graphical desktop environments, terminal emulator programs are available for those purposes. Most programming languages support standard streams for inputting and printing text, and it is simple and common to connect the streams to a text terminal.
Read more about this topic: Tty (Unix)
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