Comment by SwellJoe

"then downloading a Java applet with a very specific (obsolete) version of Java. The applet didn't support copy and paste, and frequently repeated keys"

Ah, yes, Lantronix Spider. My current colo still uses that old bastard. It's the only reason I still have Java on one of my laptops. And, now that our colocated servers are getting old and crotchety, I'm beginning to think it's not worth it and considering moving out to some cloud-based thing (but to keep costs down we'd need to reimplement a lot of stuff, because "big box with a bunch of services running" is outrageously expensive on the major cloud-based virtual machines, compared to ~$100/month to stick a fat server in a rack and get a gigabit pipe plugged into it).