I had made a display for "reading the mail", and it didn't require too much power. An old Radio Shack toy provided
the case, and one of the TI-99 keyboards completed the major components.

With a low-speed Xtal to keep power requirements down.
It provided good performance at speeds up to 19.2K

An 8032-based terminal (Menu displayed)

More?

OK, here is the main menu display, F= function key.

 F/1 MENU ON/OFF  F/8 ECHO
 F/2 BAUD RATES    F/9 BELL ON/OFF
 F/3 PARITY              F/0 SCROLL *
 F/4 FLOW CONTR   F/K CR/CHAR
 F/5 SCRN SIZE         F/L LF ON/OFF
 F/6 SCRN SPEED     F/= STATUS
 F/7 TAB/SPACE
 *  ARROWS TO SCROLL

Speed could be set from 300-19.2K. I used a
slower Xtal to keep power requirements down.

Screen:
The screen could be set to 32/36/40/80 characters.
(80 character mode displayed a 40X8 portion of a
     80x25 line virtual display.[VT100/ANSI])

The display could also be slowed down when
receiving. A 6K buffer was used for receive to keep
the receive running at line speed, and to allow
backward scrolling. It beeped and speeded up
when the buffer filled up.

Parity could be set to odd, even, none, mark, space.
CR/LF could be stripped, added, converted to NL...

Bell characters could be displayed or produce a beep.

You get the idea, if it was software, I made it
configurable. I even replaced the 80C32 with an
87C52, and later an 89C52.

I had to develop my own RTOS-like control program.
Good experience for someone who poked around in the
mainframe and communications world for many years.
I found out that supporting a system is much different
than creating one!