Terminal

What is a "Terminal" in a Computer?

A terminal is, generally, an application with a window with black background and white text where you can type text commands, called terminal commands, which are interpreted by a type of program called shell. In this sense, it's also called a terminal window or console. To have a window, we also need a program called a window manager running. If the operating system doesn't have a window manager, the whole screen may become a single terminal, i.e. the entire screen would be black with white text for you to type terminal commands. In the past, computers weren't capable of displaying images, only text, and even the screen resolutions weren't measured in pixels, but in the maximum number of columns and lines of text that could be display at a given moment. In this era, physical computers (the hardware) were called terminals. These days, "physical terminal" is a phrase that is used in this sense.