alt Hacker NewsToday if we say "open an xterm and type this command" we mean to start a program that runs in a window that has a text interface with a command line.
Here is an X terminal from around 1990.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal
It displayed everything over the network via X11 from a more powerful workstation / server.
> Datapro wrote in 1991 that X terminals could provide windowing capability, high-resolution graphics and relatively fast processing for prices starting around US$1,500, compared with workstations that could cost more than US$10,000.
When I got to the university, we had a DG/UX server, the usual green and ambar phosphor text terminals, and the few lucky ones IBM X Windows terminals, which were mostly used to manage several xterms, given the choice of applications at the time.