[ggm]

What does the word emulator mean any more in this context?

We all use it but there are now possibly two generations of people who never used an adm-5 or vt100 so what exactly is being emulated?

It's a terminal program. It implements the function of a command line access protocol.

[fit2rule]

The Emulator was a pretty decent early commercial sampler product:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mu_Emulator

It was called such, because it could be used to 'emulate any instrument' by recording it, and playing back the samples ..

[DanBC]

E-mu made my favourite drum machine, the drumulator.

If you open it up you can lift then reseat an IC (I think it's the only one in a socket) and you get random drum patterns and sometimes those a great.