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At the risk of missing something completely obvious: where's the "emulator" part in it? What is it emulating? It looks like a terminal (no emulator) to me. Not trolling, just trying to learn.



Thank you. I think it's a bit misleading then to call it a "terminal emulator". It's not really emulating one of those old boxes, is it? It's providing a text interface to a computer's functions. That's great but it's not emulating anything.


It emulates them in the sense that they implement a virtual display and keyboard for the same wire protocols those old boxes used. Those protocols are mostly plain text, but also escape sequences for cursors, colors, layout, etc. Check out the VT100 sequences for example.


Like all similar software, it's emulating a physical terminal: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_terminal.


If you can get through this, I highly recommend it.

https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty


"Terminal" used to refer to a dumb computer that would send user input to a remote mainframe and receive instructions for drawing to the screen.




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