> I'm trying to figure out what the target audience is
Probably it was some sort of terminal for industrial equipment; nothing to write home about by today's standards (and yesterday's too for that matter), but could be used for slow and not critical tasks such as EEprom/chips programmer, serial terminal for known soft/hard protocols and signals. I would find useful having one that accesses a shared directory on the LAN then can read firmware files and program chips or read/write on rs232 or i2c busses, work as serial terminal for debugging etc, and other tasks where a laptop could be overkill.
Probably it was some sort of terminal for industrial equipment; nothing to write home about by today's standards (and yesterday's too for that matter), but could be used for slow and not critical tasks such as EEprom/chips programmer, serial terminal for known soft/hard protocols and signals. I would find useful having one that accesses a shared directory on the LAN then can read firmware files and program chips or read/write on rs232 or i2c busses, work as serial terminal for debugging etc, and other tasks where a laptop could be overkill.