In this organisation everyone wants to share information, but if the files are held on a file server in London then it is going to be painfully slow for the guys on remote computers in Edinburgh to use Microsoft Word to open, edit and save Word documents, especially if the document is large and contains lots of graphics. If you’re wondering why that would be better than using programs running on your PC, imagine you work for an organisation with branches or sites across the country.

A modern terminal server works in the same way, all the applications run on the computer running the Terminal Server Service rather than on the PC you might use to connect to it over a TCP IP network like your local area network or even over the internet. In the old days of green screen terminals there were no applications running on the terminal, everything ran on the big old mainframe in the next building. They were renamed Remote Desktop Servers with Microsoft Windows Server 2008, but actually the dumb terminal concept is quite appropriate when trying to explain “what is a terminal server”. Terminal Servers on the other hand is a bit of an archaic term and goes back to the time when people used “dumb” terminals. Web servers serve up websites, file servers give access to files and folders, print servers manage the printing of documents and so on. Computer “servers” tend to perform a specific function.

Windows terminal services