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| | What's a Terminal? |
 | | Video terminals, also known as CRTs (Cathode Ray Tubes), appeared on the scene in the mid-1960s and dominated the human-computer interface from the early 1970s (when they began to displace hardcopy terminals) until the mid-1980s, when PCs began to take over. |
 | | The great advantage of video terminals over their predecessors (besides the obvious ones of not using paper, ribbons, and ink and making less noise) is the ability to position the cursor on the screen (thus allowing full-screen editing, forms-filling data entry, games, etc), to "edit" the screen (e.g. |
 | | Emulation of a particular terminal such as VT100, Linux Console, or SNI 97801 must take all these details into account and convert between the PC's keys, codes, glyphs, and controls, and the ones used by the terminal it is emulating. |
| www.columbia.edu /kermit/terminals.html (463 words) |
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