I am studying the history of computers to better understand why Linux terminals work the way they do. I have read that in the mid 1970's to the mid 1980's, most people used real terminals (as opposed to terminal emulators) to communicate with large computers, this is an example of a real terminal:But I am unable to find information about these large computers that the real terminals were connected to. Can anybody provide a name/picture of such large computer?
What do the large computers that real terminals were connected to look like?
terminal;history
That terminal would typically be connected to a PDP-11, or a VAX-11 (it can be used with many, many different types of computers though!). The PDP-11, like many mini-computers, was often housed in a rack:You can see detailed photos of a Data General Nova rack (along with a terminal) on our sister Retrocomputing site.Some variants were housed in cabinets; this was also typically the case for Vaxen:(Both photos taken from the Wikipedia articles linked above.)Terminals were used with computers of all sizes, from room-sized mainframes such as the PDP-10 to tower PC-sized VAXServers (thanks to hobbs for the link to that photo  the server shown there is smaller than many PC servers of the time!)or even pizza-box workstations in the mid-nineties.You can still connect many of these terminals to a modern PC running Linux or various other operating systems, as long as the PC has serial ports, or USB-to-RS-232 adapters (as pointed out by Michael Kjrling), and you use null-modem cables to connect them (as pointed out by Mark Plotnick).Check out Dinosaurs Pen for many, many more photos of such systems in actual use. Some applications still in production use software dating back to these kinds of systems, although commonly the hardware is emulated; an example was given recently at Systems we love.