[ This is excerpted from my introduction to Emacspeak that I wrote in 2003. Emacspeak is an audio desktop, one of four types of user interface. I am not permanently blind, but I do drive a car, so some of the time I am situationally blind.
[ This is not about Emacspeak, but about the words used for windowing systems. I try to explain them to people who cannot see them. ]
Because of the adoption of Xerox Parc-style windowing systems over the past generation, many people have become confused by Emacs' use of the words window and frame. Emacs provides for multiple windows within a frame, as it always has.
When you are situationally blind, or if you are permanently blind, you will probably not use a graphic user interface at all; but enough people do that you will hear what they say.
Nowadays, sighted people often think of a window on a computer screen as being a contiguous, usually rectangular space, what in Emacs is called a frame. That is because Emacs was designed initially to fill a complete display as a tiling window manager. (A tiling window manager is one in which windows do not overlap, but are contiguous, like physical tiles.) Parts of the display were called windows because they enabled a sighted person to look at all or part of a buffer.
Companies like Apple and Sun, and the X Consortium, copied Emacs jargon for their own windows, to mean a part of a screen. (Or else the notion of a window was generic and commonplace.)
Thus, the term window started out and continues to mean a part of a display.
But when Apple, Sun, and the X Consortium, and their followers, adopted the term window to mean a part of a display, they lacked a term to handle a part of a window.
(The word `pane' was suggested, but never popular, because it sounds similar to the word `pain', spelled p a i n, and because some people were accustomed to material windows that were not made up of multiple `panes of glass'.)
However, in those days, mostly the 1980s, windows seldom contained parts, other than a menu or tool bar or panel that applied to a whole window. Thus, one spreadsheet would appear in one window; one file would appear in another.
Indeed, many of the non-Emacs programs I use today in a graphic user
interface still tend to put one set of contents, with its associated
panels and tool bars, into one window: for example, XMMS, Mozilla, or
gnome-apt.
With Emacs, on the other hand, you could always put a directory listing, two files, and an email message into four different parts of an Apple or X style window (although most people keep to one or two parts most of the time). These different parts had always been themselves called windows, and so they remained. Hence, the invention of the term frame to refer to a segment of a display as produced by an X or Sun user interface program.