Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lproven 1436 days ago
Um. I am not sure if you appreciate the difference.

AIUI, those are terminal emulators. Programs that let you attach to a text session on the same or another computer.

Terminal emulators are programs that emulate terminals. "Terminals" are a type of hardware. A screen and a keyboard that attach over RS232 serial links, running at maybe 9600 bits per second -- a really fast one might do, ooh, 19200bps -- to a computer. They can only display text.

(Graphical terminals existed but cost as much as a quite nice car at the time, and so remained rare.)

The clever thing in this WordPerfect version can display a "graphical" print preview on a text-only terminal.

This is trivially easy in software, but a pretty amazing feat of coding on dedicated hardware.