This may be an interesting project: a tiny ASCII terminal (7-bit) inspired by the ADM-3A terminal. Source code as well as Gerber files are available at GitHub.
The Adam74 is a little project that tries to act as the latter half of the above “ASCII bus”. It is in short a little terminal that a hobbyist might enjoy using for a small 8-bit computer they’re experimenting with.
As described above, it relies on 7 pins to represent a 7-bit ASCII character and another pin that the connected device strobes in order to tell the Adam74 that there is a character waiting on the input pins to buffer and display. The prevalence of easy-to-interface small LCD displays and inexpensive microcontrollers to drive them made this project a no-brainer.
Like a terminal, the Adam74 handles wrapping of text, scrolling. It also handles many control codes like carriage return and bell. Other control codes are re-interpreted to give a simple cursor control interface, etc.