A Dumb Terminal is a stand-alone terminal that has no processing capability of its own?

Answer 1

That is correct a dumb terminal does what is called an emulation. Whenever you turn it own, it emulates an operating system that is on a server somewhere. The dumb terminal is a display monitor with no processing abilities.

Answer 2

Rtrahan is half right. A dumb terminal is unable to process anything itself but it is not performing any emulation. Terminal emulation is a beast of an entirely different color. Specifically, terminal emulation is used by a computer to make it look like a dumb terminal to the computer being accessed so that it knows how to send the data so that it displays correctly on the screen of the computer.

Now, as for what a dumb terminal is, it is basically a way to view the user interface of a mainframe or other type of computer from afar. These were quite often used in the 1970s and 1980s when PCs were not really available yet and even when they were, they were too expensive to let just everyone have them. So, instead, dumb terminals that cost a fraction of the price were provided and allowed people to interface with the central computer. A great example of this is when my father (a university professor) wanted to enter the grades of his students at the end of the semester, he would turn on the dumb terminal in his office, enter his username and password, and then get into the appropriate function to transcribe the data into the official student records. The dumb terminal did not process, analyze, or otherwise utilize the data. All it did was display the system interface on the screen and allow the user to type or otherwise offer input to the computer at the other end of the connection.