The good old terminal

Before we get in to the cool stuff, it's important to gain some perspective on the problem we're trying to solve. It is, in fact, a real problem dating back to the early days of computers.

Back in the 1970s, in the early days of computers, it was quite common to see terminals in offices much like the one shown in the following image:

The good old terminal

The nature of these terminals was to be as dumb as possible. They didn't do any computation, nor did they hold any state. The terminal only reflected what the server wanted the terminal to show on screen, so in many ways they were just really fancy television sets. Any input from the user's keyboard ...

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