Time Sharing on Dumb Terminals

When computers first came into widespread use in business, they were typically run from a mainframe, or large, central computer, which was connected to a number of dumb terminals. One such terminal, the popular VT100, is shown here. These terminals sat on a desktop (or their own stand), but contained no real computing capabilities of their own. All the computing power was in the central host, and the terminal was simply an I/O device (see Module 7).

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