Terminal Services

Terminal Services, renamed as Remote Desktop Services from Windows Server 2008 R2 onwards, is one of the components of Microsoft Windows (both server and client versions) that allows a user to access applications and data on a remote computer over a network. Terminal Services is Microsoft's implementation of thin-client terminal server computing, where Windows applications, or even the entire desktop of the computer running terminal services, are made accessible to a remote client machine. The client can either be a fully-fledged computer, running any operating system as long as the terminal services protocol is supported, or a bare-bones machine powerful enough to support the protocol (such as Windows FLP). With terminal services, only the user interface of an application is presented at the client. Any input to it is redirected over the network to the server, where all application processing takes place.^[1] This is in contrast to appstreaming systems, like Microsoft Application Virtualization, in which the applications, while still stored on a centralized server, are streamed to the client on-demand and then processed by the client machine.

Source:  Wikipedia