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Starlink from 1984

nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com

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Re: Starlink from 1984

#21

Post by walrus01 »

healthworker wrote: post #8

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 mor…

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.

https://github.com/debauchee/barrier

Unfortunately the new price of raspberry pi is kind of ridiculous.

Re: Starlink from 1984

#23

Post by aa-jv »

inigyou wrote: post #20
aa-jv wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 w…

Everything you say is true, NUC's kind of ate this problem.

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 ..

Re: Starlink from 1984

#24

Post by vel0city »

aa-jv wrote: post #23
inigyou wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Everything you say is true, NUC's kind of ate this problem. 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 ..

I like this guy's series on building out a collection of SunRay thin clients connecting back to his SPARC server.

https://youtu.be/9BW-mbC7Xag

Re: Starlink from 1984

#25

Post by inigyou »

aa-jv wrote: post #23
inigyou wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Everything you say is true, NUC's kind of ate this problem. 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 ..

Linus Tech Tips did one for gaming, just for fun. https://youtube.com/watch?v=uKJw8IKVYQ8

Re: Starlink from 1984

#26

Post by brk »

aa-jv wrote: post #14

In that era (87/88'ish) I used Quarterdeck Desqview to provide multi-user capabilities on my (then) super-charged 486: 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 hear…

There used to be a card you could plug into a PC ISA Bus that gave you a second workstation/interface. The main selling point was to allow 2 users to share a single PC for cost savings. IIRC, it only supported text displays, but for 99% of the use cases at the time that was plenty.

Re: Starlink from 1984

#27

Post by RajT88 »

Woah. I've seen this before, boxes lying around in old closets.

I visited my dad at work once, and the setup looked just like this. I couldn't tell you if it was Starlink directly, but I heard that when my sister visited, one of his coworkers did something to mess with my dad's terminal's screen.

Re: Starlink from 1984

#28

Post by gwbas1c »

aa-jv wrote: post #15
healthworker wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't read the article. This has nothing to do with satellite-delivered Internet.

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…

> 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...

> 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...

That makes no sense, for a few reasons:

The shared computer model is generally replaced by RDP (or similar) to a VM running in the cloud.

Vast majority of people use laptops or other portable computers; using networked applications where resource sharing happens "in the cloud": IE, web applications. The portability of laptops trumps stationary computers.

Furthermore, with modern economics, the computing power to do basic computing is so cheap that "dumb terminals" don't make sense anymore: A computer powerful enough to run a web browser costs about the same as what it would take to make a "dumb terminal".

Remember, a typical smart TV is a computer powerful enough to run a web browser or a general office suite.

Re: Starlink from 1984

#29

Post by wat10000 »

aa-jv wrote: post #15
healthworker wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't read the article. This has nothing to do with satellite-delivered Internet.

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…

Thin clients are incredibly popular these days. It's just that the PC or smartphone is the thin client, and the central "PC" is the cloud.

Re: Starlink from 1984

#30

Post by nizmow »

aa-jv wrote: post #14

In that era (87/88'ish) I used Quarterdeck Desqview to provide multi-user capabilities on my (then) super-charged 486: 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 hear…

Kind of a pointless nitpick, but you’d have been very lucky to own a 386 in 87-88, the 486 wouldn’t be mainstream until 1992 or so.
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