picocom is a minimal dumb-terminal emulation program.  It is, in principle,
very much like minicom, only it's pico instead of mini!

Picocom was designed to serve as a simple, manual, modem configuration,
testing, and debugging tool.  It has also served (quite well) as a low-tech
"terminal-window" to allow operator
 intervention in PPP connection scripts (something like the ms-windows
 "open terminal window before / after dialing" feature).
It could also prove useful in many other similar tasks.

Picocom is ideal for embedded systems since its memory footprint is minimal
(less than 20K, when stripped).

Apart from being a handy little tool, picocom source distribution includes
a simple, easy to use, and thoroughly documented
 terminal-management library, which could serve other projects as well.
This library hides the termios(3) calls, and provides a less complex and
safer (though certainly less feature-rich) interface.

Picocom runs on Linux, and with minor modifications it could run on any
Unix system with the termios(3) library.