They provide a software emulation of a physical device called a terminal such as a VT100, which looked like this…Ī VT100 terminal could interpret voltage pulses coming from a wire as a stream of bytes, containing ASCII-encoded text.
They are called terminals for short because they function as terminal emulators. On Linux common terminal programs are Gnome Terminal, LXTerminal or xterm. On Mac OS X it is available by clicking Terminal.app in /Applications/Utilities On Windows you can access a terminal on your laptop by running “Command Prompt” or cmd.exe. Terminal programs are available built-in to all major operating systems.
A terminal, also known as a terminal, command line or console is an interactive program which allows you to type commands – lines of text which are interpreted as instructions to control your computer.
