There were. They were called X terminals ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal ) and there were quite a few of them on the market around the early 90s, supplanting the traditional terminal protocols. Then there were quite a number of Thin Client ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client ) devices that were a hair more independent than dumb X terminals, from players like Sun (Sun Ray) and Wyse (Now part of Dell).
There was an inversion from "Users per to Computer" to "Computers per User" and that model mostly fell out of favor.
Yes and those X-Terminals were exactly what X was invented for. This is why the net transparency is not great over high-latency connections, it was never designed for that. In those days companies only had a handful of "computers" and people worked on terminals. Usually shared over a 10 megabit shared ethernet bus, which was surprisingly responsive!
However they were more than a simple terminal. Most of them were basically small Unix computers (like the SPARC X-terminal which was just a diskless low-powered SPARCstation, it could actually run full Solaris). HP's EnvizeX stuff was similarly complex though I don't think they could run HP-UX. But they weren't nearly as 'dumb' as the text terminals of the days.
I still have a few Sun Rays here but they used a very different protocol that only worked with their proprietary software.
However I do expect a return of this model. Now with the cloud, a lot of computing is once again shifting to a central model rather than on the endpoint.
There are third-party X servers for Windows, but almost nobody has heard of them, while everyone has a browser. So we’re abusing Javascript and HTML to replace X as a remote UI protocol for desktops/laptops that barely have any installed software.
X application draws on X Server, imagine server drawing on <canvas> over websocket. Each character I type would be handled by server. I can't imagine hardware requirements for HN in this model.
There was an inversion from "Users per to Computer" to "Computers per User" and that model mostly fell out of favor.