A dumb terminal is a terminal hooked up to a mainframe.
Back in the days of yore, a long, long time ago in computer history, computers were expensive. Only large corporations, colleges, and government agencies could afford them. Not only were they expensive, they were huge. Back in those days, a computer could take up an entire room. Some of the larger ones could take up an entire basement.
With computers so expensive, you couldn't buy a computer for everyone in your organization who needed to access one, and since they were so large they didn't conveniently fit where they could be used by those who needed to use them. Thus was invented the dumb terminal.
A dumb terminal was connected to the mainframe in a remote location. It had a screen and a keyboard and looked alot like a computer itself. However, technically, it wasn't. Dumb terminals performed no processing tasks themselves. Instead, their primary function was to act as a gateway to the mainframe.
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