Screen scraping is normally associated with the programmatic collection of visual data from a source, instead of parsing data as in web scraping. Originally, screen scraping referred to the practice of reading text data from a computer display terminal's screen. This was generally done by reading the terminal's memory through its auxiliary port, or by connecting the terminal output port of one computer system to an input port on another. The term screen scraping is also commonly used to refer to the bidirectional exchange of data. This could be the simple cases where the controlling program navigates through the user interface, or more complex scenarios where the controlling program is entering data into an interface meant to be used by a human. As a concrete example of a classic screen scraper, consider a hypothetical legacy system dating from the 1960s — the dawn of computerized data processing. Computer to user interfaces from that era were often simply text-based dumb termi...