As its name suggests, [picocom] is a minimal dumb-terminal emulation program. It is, in principle, very much like minicom, only it's "pico" instead of "mini"! It was designed to serve as a simple, manual, modem configuration, testing, and debugging tool. It has also served as a low-tech "terminal-window" to allow operator intervention in PPP connection scripts . It could also prove useful in many other similar tasks. It is ideal for embedded systems since its memory footprint is minimal .