In the old days, when processing and data storage were far more expensive than they are now, owning a personal computer made little sense. And almost nobody had one. Instead, companies would set up a central processing system—not so different for modern-day cloud computing—except that no personal computers would be attached to it. Personal computers, for all intents and purposes, didn’t exist. Instead, users would connect using what were called “dumb terminals” or “shells”; essentially little more than keyboards with screens attached, these individual units had no computing power of their own but instead relied on the central processing unit for everything. Everyone just shared one giant computer with lots of screens attached.
Memory Becomes Cheaper
But as memory became cheaper, and building small, powerful processors became a reality that tech engineers could deliver and end users came to expect, large, central processors that served an entire company or network were no longer necessary. Instead, the personal computer was born. Before the Internet, this meant that now computing was very isolated, and technologies like the floppy disk and 3 disk became viable storage methods.
Back to Connectivity
Then the Internet came and changed everything. Connectivity became a major part of computing again, and today, there’s even a resurgence of terminal-style computing units, and software designed specifically to run on these units.
But nobody wants to buy a screen and a keyboard and just hook it up to some cloud-based central computer: we expect more than that now, and most personal computers are actually quite capable of handling the simple tasks that most of us do every day. However, increasingly, employees are asked to manipulate huge databases or perform massive calculations that may outpace the available performance of their little self-contained computer, and that has led to the rise of the terminal emulator.
What’s a Terminal Emulator?
A terminal emulator, at its most basic, acts like an old terminal attached to a central processor, but isn’t a physical computer. It’s just a piece of software, so you can run your personal computing in one window, then open up another and have your computer interacting with a central unit elsewhere—whether you’re connected through an intranet or the Web. So you’re essentially running two computers at once; you’re directly interacting with your personal computer, and you’re also interacting with the host computer that your terminal emulator is communicating with.
New Technology; New Abilities
Old terminals each had their own coding language. You couldn’t hook up an IBM terminal to a DEC host. They wouldn’t talk to each other. Most terminal emulators today, however, have configurability, so that you can set your terminal to talk to whatever kind of host you want. Some even allow you to talk to multiple hosts that all speak different languages simultaneously.
The Rocket Passport terminal emulator (for PC) is designed for Window 8, and offers connectivity with a wide selection of different emulators within a single platform. With features like FTP file transfer and multi-host access, Rocket Passport continues to lead the market in new terminal emulation software.