The name may not be immediately familiar, but if you've ever seen the cold green (or amber) glow of a text-based "dumb terminal" in a bank or shop, odds are good you've come in contact with a Wyse machine. Dell today announced its intention to acquire Wyse, which has dominated segments of the dumb terminal market since the early 80s; over the years, those terminals have evolved into "thin clients" and "zero clients," but the concept has always been the same — small-footprint terminals that connect to a server on the back end. (Back when Wyse got its start, those were the computers we called "mainframes.")