Hi,

I think i am not referring to the 'shell' by saying terminal here. IN my book, it mentioned things like smart and dumb terminals and talked about plugging the terminal in the serial port. So i assume it's a type of hardware here? What are they???

thnx

never heard of any hardware called a terminal. A terminal is usually just an area on the screen that accepts commands and outputs data.

the little black box on your screen where you run command is a Terminal EMULATOR. as it simulates a real terminal. A real terminal is a very basic, nee dumb computer that connects to a mainframe system over a physical protocol. This is going by the waaaaay old conventions of how computing was done, i.e. a business or college having a single 5 acre computer, with maybe 200 terminals running off it. That architecture is extremely uncommon now, but ou still can run a terminal under linux using a parallel port. This can be handy if your X window server crashes or such, so you can use the terminal to get back in and so forth. All these semantics and descriptinos are somewhat irrelevant, and a terminal emulator is just generally referred to as a terminal itself nowadays, it's very much a legacy expression, but that's where it comes from.

Also you can use a regular computer to connect over serial to another, and then you'd assign an xterm or whatever (or hyperterminal under windows) to use port directly, rather than a virtual session. This douwldn't be a dumb terminal in this case as dumb terminals are dedicated fall back hardware that will always use an rs232 or suchlike. there are tons of different terminal types that are still valid terminals, like dumb, graphic and so on. check the terminal howto for more info

useful...?

cool

ter·mi·nal Pronunciation Key (tûrm-nl)


n.

1. Computer Science. A device, often equipped with a keyboard and a video display, through which data or information can be entered or displayed.

My University still uses terminals for it's library services. They are slowly bringing in proper computers for the job, but then they only run telnet://lib.plymouth.ac.uk from IE. Silly idiots.