Screen, keyboard, and a line to somewhere else
A CRT terminal combined a display, keyboard, and serial connection. Many terminals contained no general-purpose computer capable of running a visitor’s programs: keyboard characters could be transmitted to a remote host, which did the computation and returned characters for the CRT to display.
That separation made time-sharing practical. A single host could serve people at many terminals, turning one central computer into a multi-user system.
Serial speed and echo
Serial communication sends data in sequence over a line. Baud describes the signaling rate; it is not always characters per second. Common asynchronous framing added start, stop, and sometimes parity bits, so practical character throughput was lower.
In local echo, the terminal displays a key itself. In remote echo, the host receives the character and sends it back before it appears. Switch between LOCAL and ONLINE in the exhibit to see the difference.
Original educational recreation
This is an original, historically inspired browser recreation—not an emulator of a specific commercial terminal, a real UNIX/Linux system, or a connection to a real remote machine.
The interface and simulation are original museum code. No proprietary ROM or software is distributed; no backend, network connection, telemetry, visitor data, or external runtime dependency is used.