Penguin
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An Acronym for TeleType.

A console; a device that looks like a typewriter. Something that has a screen and some kind of keyboard.

An abstract TTY has a standard input, standard output, and a standard error -- stdin(3), stdout(3) and stderr(3).

There are many different kinds of TTY. These days you'll find terminal emulators (such as xterm(1) and Screen) using a "vt-100" compatible terminal type, used for things like mapping key codes to characters. getty(8) or similar is often invoked by Linux distributions on boot to start terminals on the virtual consoles (ctrl+alt+f1 and up).

You can use stty(1) to modify some characteristics of your terminal - for example, characters used to delete previous character/word, local echo (for entering passwords),