I was explicitly talking about the "UI" part. Even the interaction with your HDD through its serial interface ended up on, no big surprise, your display. I do

I was explicitly talking about the "UI" part. Even the interaction with your HDD through its serial interface ended up on, no big surprise, your display. I don't question TUIs as such! I question how we implement them. The whole "terminal emulator dance" is imho strictly unnecessary. You could also talk to your HDD through its line interface by, for example, some proper RPC mechanism. (With the help of some adequate client software, which could be a CLI application, but also a GUI tool). The HDD doesn't have to provide a framebuffer based user interface, of course. Your client does. Someone else pointed even already to something baking my assumption that getting rid of all the layers of emulation of more than ancient hardware would be not only possible but is even desirable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34158846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34158846