The term stuck for several reasons. The earlier term 'graphical terminal' had been chosen to distinguish such terminals from text-based terminals, and thus put the emphasis heavily on "graphics" – which became obsolete as a distinguishing characteristic in the 1990s as text-only physical terminals themselves became obsolete, and text-only computer systems (a few of which existed in the 1980s) were no longer manufactured. The term 'thin client' also conveys better what was then viewed as the fundamental difference: thin clients can be designed with less expensive hardware, because they have reduced computational workloads.