The star-topology read is a fun guess, but the real bottleneck in any 1984-era version would've been the ground stations, not the mesh. Feels more like a nod to that era's centralized comms than a literal network diagram.
Along these lines, it would be neat to use Raspberry Pi or something to make a "terminal to HDMI adapter", allowing me to have an unlimited number (tens or even hundreds) of external monitors for my laptop, each running a separate terminal-mode program such as a text editor, htop, Bloomberg, etc.
I often find fully working LCD monitors discarded by people who have no use for them, and could easily collect five or more of them that way if I had a convenient way to "wire them up" to my laptop.
You kind of can do this already with a raspberry pi strapped to the back of a monitor and "barrier", the successor to synergy, to use the keyboard and pointing device of your laptop on as many displays on the same desk as you want. Each one is an independent computer.
If you have enough USB ports, you should be able to get away with using DisplayLink dongles for the video part. DisplayLink doesn't require any additional video processing hardware (unlike DisplayPort) or even USB-C ports, you can run the old DisplayLink standard over plain old USB 2! Not great for playing video, but a terminal app should run just fine.
I think the current driver restricts you to 4 displays but I'm not entirely sure why (you can do 6 on Windows so I think it must be a driver issue).
Of course, with your RPi idea, you could connect one computer to dozens or maybe hundreds of serial ports, but if all you want is five more screens, USB should do fine for your needs.
DisplayLink creates virtual displays on CPU and stream compressed feed over USB. That takes non-negligible amount of CPU time and RAM bandwidth, and it makes sense to give it a max concurrent stream count(set aside which of 4 or 6 are more reasonable).
It would seem what apps needed the most back then was more RAM and compute and it's still true today, we've just offload ed most of the compute and RAM requirements to GPUs now NVLink/NVswitch/Infiband is what Starlink was back then for $5000 DGX sparks and similar systems only
It was possible to wire things up so that multiple users could connect to a separate Desqview instance and have their own local user context, albeit an MSDOS one .. it was quite functional as a multi-user system for a few years until I got on minix-list and heard about that little project Linus was working on, then decided to switch ..
I'm pretty sure there's a modern way to do this with a Linux system packed with video cards and multiple USB keyboard/mice accessories .. one of these days it'd be nice to do that, and get things caught up with how it used to be, SGI-wise ..
This is a great reminder that many of today's "breakthroughs" were imagined decades ago. What's changed isn't just the technology, but the economics and engineering needed to make it practical
True, they probably didn't read the article - but their claim is still relevant.
We really don't have an easy way in the modern era to share our PC's in such a way that multiple users have their own keyboard/mouse/video combination, even though our PC's are more than capable of doing this - and the underlying technology is all right there in the kernel - but distro's just don't seem to be catering to this need, since the market hasn't identified it as something that users want.
But I guess, if there were a distribution which sets things up so that 4 or more people can use the same PC, it'd get wider adoption. I see no reason why this isn't practical, especially in cubicle environments - one fat PC for 4 or 5 people, who are mostly just doing web browsing, document editing, and ssh'ing to things, seems like a very interesting and viable service to deliver, distro-wise.
I wonder which distro's are closer to achieving this target, in the grand scheme of things .. seems to me its only a matter of configuring the X server properly, with multiple independent display units, and getting the USB keyboard/mouse dance started ..
We really abandoned the idea when computers got so cheap that you could just have a separate computer at each station. Mini PCs are $200, how will your solution compete with that? Thin clients won't get much cheaper than that as they have all the same hardware. Thin-client-less multi-user systems might, but the extra administration complexity ($howmany per sysadmin hour?) will make it a tight squeeze and you may as well just stick with what's familiar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarLAN
I often find fully working LCD monitors discarded by people who have no use for them, and could easily collect five or more of them that way if I had a convenient way to "wire them up" to my laptop.
https://github.com/debauchee/barrier
Unfortunately the new price of raspberry pi is kind of ridiculous.
I think the current driver restricts you to 4 displays but I'm not entirely sure why (you can do 6 on Windows so I think it must be a driver issue).
Of course, with your RPi idea, you could connect one computer to dozens or maybe hundreds of serial ports, but if all you want is five more screens, USB should do fine for your needs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview
It was possible to wire things up so that multiple users could connect to a separate Desqview instance and have their own local user context, albeit an MSDOS one .. it was quite functional as a multi-user system for a few years until I got on minix-list and heard about that little project Linus was working on, then decided to switch ..
I'm pretty sure there's a modern way to do this with a Linux system packed with video cards and multiple USB keyboard/mice accessories .. one of these days it'd be nice to do that, and get things caught up with how it used to be, SGI-wise ..
It’s not just technology, it’s a movement.
We really don't have an easy way in the modern era to share our PC's in such a way that multiple users have their own keyboard/mouse/video combination, even though our PC's are more than capable of doing this - and the underlying technology is all right there in the kernel - but distro's just don't seem to be catering to this need, since the market hasn't identified it as something that users want.
But I guess, if there were a distribution which sets things up so that 4 or more people can use the same PC, it'd get wider adoption. I see no reason why this isn't practical, especially in cubicle environments - one fat PC for 4 or 5 people, who are mostly just doing web browsing, document editing, and ssh'ing to things, seems like a very interesting and viable service to deliver, distro-wise.
I wonder which distro's are closer to achieving this target, in the grand scheme of things .. seems to me its only a matter of configuring the X server properly, with multiple independent display units, and getting the USB keyboard/mouse dance started ..
You could have more luck with AIO PCs.
Still, one of these days I'll get around to setting up a system like this, just for the fun of it.
I can think of a few applications where it would be fun. Music-making, for example ..