GNU Screen can be thought of as a text version of graphical window managers, or as a way of putting virtual terminals into any login session.

Screen is often used when a network connection to the terminal is unreliable, as a dropped network connection typically terminates all programs the user was running (child processes of the login session), due to the session ending and sending a "hangup" signal (SIGHUP) to all the child processes.

Screen was originally designed by Oliver Laumann and Carsten Bormann at Technische Universität Berlin and published in 1987.

Around 1990, Laumann handed over maintenance of the code to Jürgen Weigert and Michael Schroeder at the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg, who later moved the project to the GNU Project and added features such as scrollback, split-screen, copy-and-paste, and screen sharing.

In May 2015, on openSUSE Conference, Jürgen Weigert invited Alexander Naumov to help to develop and maintain GNU screen.