Wiktionary
n. (context computing English) A computer terminal consisting of a monitor (usually in monochrome) and keyboard, but (unlike a personal computer) having almost no processing capability, used to provide input to and receive output from a remote server, minicomputer, or mainframe.
Usage examples of "dumb terminal".
Joe College sits down at his dumb terminal to the University DEC 10 and decides to poke around the campus network.
He was just a dumb terminal plunked down in front of a camera to frustrate her.
A Lee Data dumb terminal is stuffed under a book table next to an early vintage Mac.
Users at remote sites, like the officer in London, could do nothing beyond entering their data on a dumb terminal or PC connected to the twenty-gigabyte server that resided at Quantico.
Except for your PC and the one in the morgue, everything else is a dumb terminal.
A dumb terminal, she went on to remind me, is rather much what it sounds like-a brainless unit consisting of a monitor and a keyboard.
It looked like a dumb terminal, which meant it probably didn't have access to much, but it was worth a try anyway.
Yet it could receive as much data as any other dumb terminal in existence, and display it in more varied, complex configurations.
It has solar batteries for powering a lamp, a hot plate, or a dumb terminal.