EMACS used to have a printing terminal mode -- which shouldn't be surprising when you consider that it was written in TECO, an editor for printing terminals. In fact EMACS evolved because a display mode (^R mode) had been
added to TECO, which opened up new possibilities.
Even after display terminals became more commonplace in the late 70s, the connections were not always particularly fast (110 baud was still fairly common though 300 baud was most prevalent by then. Some people had lightning-fast 1200 or even 2400baud terminals, though in some cases, like at Stanford, still slow upload, like asymmetric home connections today. So EMACS had some support for "slow terminal" mode in which display updating was intermittent rather than every time you typed a character.
These modes worked if you knew what was already in your buffer and were used to typing without looking at the keyboard and screen all the time.
The arpanet was also pretty slow by current standards so there was a remote login protocol called SUPDUP (as in the Super Duper display protocol) that (to simplify massively) did display updating locally, sort of like a networked channel controller on steroids.
None of this survived into GNU emacs as by then the networks, at least the local networks, were better.
Even after display terminals became more commonplace in the late 70s, the connections were not always particularly fast (110 baud was still fairly common though 300 baud was most prevalent by then. Some people had lightning-fast 1200 or even 2400baud terminals, though in some cases, like at Stanford, still slow upload, like asymmetric home connections today. So EMACS had some support for "slow terminal" mode in which display updating was intermittent rather than every time you typed a character.
These modes worked if you knew what was already in your buffer and were used to typing without looking at the keyboard and screen all the time.
The arpanet was also pretty slow by current standards so there was a remote login protocol called SUPDUP (as in the Super Duper display protocol) that (to simplify massively) did display updating locally, sort of like a networked channel controller on steroids.
None of this survived into GNU emacs as by then the networks, at least the local networks, were better.