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Back somewhere after the dinosaurs but before PCs, people interacted with "real" computers through a terminal. The first common terminal was the Teletype, and this Silent 700 can be viewed as being a direct descendent of that.
It interfaced to a modem (some models had this built in), and printed on thermal paper. Because of the thermal paper rather than using an inked ribbon, it weighed only a few pounds, and ran at a breakneck speed of 30 characters per second, both major improvements over the teletype.
This model was near the end of the Silent 700 series and was probably the lightest model that TI produced.
This particular unit was never used, and has the original manual, and an unopened roll of paper.