Back in the day, terminal were essentially just a peripheral. They were only able to send and receive data to the mainframe. Those terminals were not smart enough (not enough memory or compute) to be able to process the data typed by the user. The mainframe had to do everything for them (including echoing back characters).
A lot changed since then. We have all have plenty of computing power in our laptops and do not need to connect to mainframes anymore. What did not change is the architecture. When laptop started to become common, smart folks decided to reuse the same architecture by replicating in software (in the OS) what went on between terminals and mainframes.
Each machine is connected via two cables: one to send instructions to the computer and one to receive output from the computer.
These cables are connected to the computer through a serial cable plugged into a Universal Asynchronous Receiver and Transmitter (UART).
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Back in the day, terminal were essentially just a peripheral. They were only able to send and receive data to the mainframe. Those terminals were not smart enough (not enough memory or compute) to be able to process the data typed by the user. The mainframe had to do everything for them (including echoing back characters).
A lot changed since then. We have all have plenty of computing power in our laptops and do not need to connect to mainframes anymore. What did not change is the architecture. When laptop started to become common, smart folks decided to reuse the same architecture by replicating in software (in the OS) what went on between terminals and mainframes.