What is a Dumb Terminal ?

Dumb Terminals are the most basic electronic hardware devices consisting of a keyboard and a display screen used to interact with the mainframe or CPU. Dumb terminals don't have any processing, memory, or storage capabilities. In this article, we are going to discuss Dumb Terminal.

What is Dumb Terminal?

A dumb terminal is an electronic device consisting of a display screen and an input device (generally a keyboard). It doesn't have any processing capabilities or sometimes minimal processing capabilities in modern dumb terminals. It relies completely on a central mainframe computer to process data and commands. Dumb terminals simply act as an interface for users to interact with the central system.

Terminologies Associated with Dumb Terminal

• Mainframe : It is a large powerful computer that is used in processing tasks for all connected dumb terminals . It can handle multiple users simultaneously.
• Server : In today's computer system , server plays same role as a mainframe in dumb terminal.It processes data and applications for multiple clients.
• Input device : Keyboards are used to give inputs to the terminal.
• Output device : Dumb terminal display screen is used to show outputs of commands.
• Thin client's: It is similar to dumb terminal but are having minimal processing power and rely on server for most of computing tasks.
• Serial connection: It is a method of connecting devices, dumb teminals uses serial connections to communicate with mainframe.

Characterstics of Dumb Terminal

• Dumb terminal have limited features , it has almost little or we can say no processing power.
• It supports a basic set of control functions, such as CR or LF to move the cursor to the next line, BS to erase the previous character, and BEL to give some sound.
• It was unable to process special escape seqences that are used for clearing a line or clearing the screen.
• Dumb terminals cannot be used for low level operations like editing.
• Dumb terminals have no local storage capabilities , they relies on server to store data

Functions of Dumb Terminal

• It provides a text-based user interface for interacting with digital computer.
• It is used to execute commands and view the results on the display screen, and control applications running on the computer.
• It can also be used to access the command line interface (CLI).
• The keyboard part is used to provide input commands to terminal.
• Monitor is used to display output recieve from server.

Conclusion

Dumb termianal performs very simple tasks like people enters data and use programs on the central server.It does't need processing or storage capabilities on thier own. This makes it chiep, reliable and easy to maintain. Dumb terminals are used in many areas like banking, healthcare, stores, and schools..etc. Today, when very few peoples amoung uses dumb terminals because we are having much advanced computers and devices these day's, the idea behind dumb terminal is still important. Modern technologies like thin clients and virtual desktops follow the same idea of using a central server.