When I first tried Linux, it was back quite a few years ago and at that time, most people who were developing software was running Windows. I was testing a Red Hat distro on a spare box which was a Pentium II 400Mhz machine with 128MB of RAM, just to find out what the fuss with Linux was about.
Since the server was a headless box, I needed a terminal client on Windows and the best one at that time and I believe it still is now, is Putty by Simon Tatham. It is really a Swiss-army knife for managing a Linux/Unix server box since it supports quite a lot of very handy functionalities.