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By "serial terminal" Swift means a technology standardized in 1960 based on principles that predate the transistor designed to print directly to a roll of continuous paper.
Pull apart your mobile phone. Find the chip doing 4G/LTE. Connect wires to the UART pins. Level shift the voltage up to 5V, then connect to a paper teletype from 1960s. Poof! Logs! 
Like all hackers, what I actually do is connect to an FTDI serial-to-USB cable, but I could be hooking up to a 1960s teletype.
I don't think people realize this. Back in the day, paper stored more content than magnetic tape/disks. Your logs went directly to paper because it was cheaper to store the paper.
At some point, outputting logs to magnetic tape became cheaper. I'm not sure when that happened, I know that around 1980, my dad's company still stored paper instead of tapes.
BTW, we are rapidly converging on solid state replacing tape. I already backup to flash drives.
