I used to have some real (hardware) terminals, back in the day when (what we then called) IP Masquerading was still kind of new, Ethernet was still expensive to sensibly implement, and old cheap still-useful PC hardware didn't usually exist (and things like freebie "closet laptops" absolutely did not exist at all).

It was a bit of a different world back then. Most of my Internet and general-computing experience happened in a terminal -- whether xterm, 80x25, or a silly high-res BIOS-based text mode set using svgatextmode. Text-based web browsing with Lynx was still useful, and Pine (email) and tin (usenet) were well-suited to those applications at that time.

I had a desktop Linux (or sometimes, FreeBSD) box that I of course did all kinds of stuff with, and at least one remote shell account on a far-away computer to provide continuity, and I also had a couple of DEC VT330 terminals that I scored cheap at the Dayton hamfest. One was next to my favorite armchair so I could chat on IRC and listen to the stereo in the sweet spot at the same time. Another was in the bedroom, which I mostly used for reading books and other passive consumption.

It all worked well, of course. There was no reason for it not to work well. And at a time when the Internet was kind of a weird thing to be involved with at all, and almost always involved exactly one person using one dialup connection in exactly one physical location, I could meander around and do my usual Internet things in a few different locations in the house (thanks, screen!).

I didn't really build it for multiple users. But sometimes, the girlfriend would hang out and chat on IRC in one place while I did my own Internet things elsewhere, all on a light-weight 32-bit computer with only a few megabytes of RAM. It did fine.

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But your question was present-tense. Because life has a way of things, I've sadly lost track of those VT330s. And your implication is correct: I haven't seen a standalone terminal in the wild for a really, really long time.

In the present-tense, I kind of miss the expediency of the interface. Many of us here use terminal emulators every day, so it may sound like I'm preaching to the choir, but I mean: The expedience of the text-based interfaces out in the wild. It is seemingly as lost as my VT330s are.

It used to be that if I needed a set of spark plugs for a car, then I might pop over to Autozone. The guy behind the counter there would mash in the make/model/year almost instantly on the terminal's keyboard, as if by muscle memory, and almost immediately he'd be rattling off different options, prices, and features.

Nowadays it's all web based. The parts store clerk's stupid-fast muscle memory has been replaced by mousing around interactively -- clicking and drooling (and worse: scrolling through stupid HTML dropdowns to find "Toyota," or "Volvo") through a website that is very much like the same website I can use from home. And that website sucks, time-wise, compared to the dumb terminal interface that they used to have muxed back to the home base.

(The only advantage I can find to the web interface that has been in place for a quarter of a century now is that it has pictures, but the pictures are often simply wrong. Bad data is no data, so this is a misfeature.)