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GUI Software Linux Hardware

FourHead: One PC, Four Users 496

Posted by timothy from the four-times-the-fun dept.
LoganGD writes "A reseach group from UFPR university in Brazil, C3SL has managed to make one Linux box run four terminals at the same time. That means four mice, keyboards, displays and users with just one CPU. The way they managed to do that can be found at the FourHead project webpage. The fact that one computer science laboratory can suport up to 60 users whit only 15 PCs is really attractive for low-resource groups and countries."
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FourHead: One PC, Four Users More

FourHead: One PC, Four Users

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  • The heat! The heat! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by foidulus ( 743482 ) * on Saturday July 03, 2004 @03:13PM (#9601454)
    I wonder what, if any, heat issues would come from running 4 video cards, and the cpu at relatively full power, in a seemingly normal sized case. I would imagine it would get pretty toasty(or very loud with all the fans running, think of the poor power supply!)
    I would be interested to see how they handle it!

    • Re:The heat! The heat! (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I would be interested to see how they handle it!

      Since they are in Brazil, the easiest way would be to move to a colder country.

    • Re:The heat! The heat! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Arathrael ( 742381 ) on Saturday July 03, 2004 @03:21PM (#9601516)
      It's not like the graphics cards are going to be pushed to the limit - I mean, the CPU wouldn't cope with them all playing ut2004 at the same time. :-) So they shouldn't be generating all that much heat, couple of case fans should cope with it no problems.

      As for the noise, it'll still be quieter than 4 separate boxes.
      • It's not like the graphics cards are going to be pushed to the limit - I mean, the CPU wouldn't cope with them all playing ut2004 at the same time. :-)

        I don't think there's any reason it couldn't, if UT2004 had been designed for this. The thing is, I bet a lot of the CPU's effort when playing that is just tracking where everything is. You need to do that whether one person is playing or four. The actual rendering is done by the graphics card; so you've got four times the hardware there. So if you wanted t

    • Hate to burst your bubble... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 03, 2004 @03:21PM (#9601522)
      But not everyone runs top of the line NVIDIA cards. I imagine the cards in this box are probably low budget Geforce 2's. Probably MX 200's. Might even be lower cards then that, since why do they need hardware 3d?

      I don't think anyone could argue that these create massive amounts of heat. What heat they do create can easily be exhausted by a case fan.

      This is definitely a setup for an environment where people are literally running on a shoestring budget. This is a really nice ability, and I'm glad someone has done it.

      • To expand further on the parent's point - I personally have 4 monitors hooked up to my main machine, using a combination of GeForce2's and FeForceMX's. And I have on ordered another GeForceMX to push my count up to 6 monitors.

        Heat has never been an issue. And this is a standard ATX case - no mods, no heavy cooling. Just one intake, one exhast, and the PSU.

      • They're TNT2, and hardware GLX is supported... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 03, 2004 @06:27PM (#9602626)
        Just here to let you know, this 4-user setup defined in this forum's topic is using four nVidia TNT2 graphics accelerators! These are better than GeForce graphics accelerators for driver-related reasons. Way back in the maturation of XFree86, with version 3.3.6, it is possible then and a throughout the 3.x XFree86 branch to configure XFree86Config to "Load """ Utah-GLX's nvidia driver to attain hardware-accelerated openGL. This is a completly different driver approach than DRI's openGL SAL. Utah-GLX provides X Server modules rather than its various competitors providing a /usr/lib/libGL.so.* and any non-standard patch cludged into the X Server. DRI project's openGL acceleration architecture at the moment may also allow mutliple local X Servers, albeit that of the various non-XFree86 such as the capable technology at DirectFB project [directfb.org] (which allows accelerated openGL without a X Server; directly using the DRI without an X Server).

        Backtracking to Utah-GLX's driver (project page here [sourceforge.net], this will allow many complex openGL-phile programs to run at the same time given its architecture. I, however, doubt that older XFree86 3.3.6 will scale to this feat; I simply don't know. Yet, the Utah-GLX driver system has been ported to XFree86-4.x; it is a openGL GLX driver package in the form of dynamically loaded X Server modules/extensions and can be manipulated into and without the X Server without having to restart the X Server. It's somwhat parallel to the DRI driver, to provide an alternative, but it is not being maintaned anymore; Utah-GLX is dead and someone needs to commandeer!

        I am using three Athlon Thunderbid 700MHz computers with a total 9 nVidia TNT2 adaptors total (three per computer), S-Video composite output to NTSC televisions, and quad-bonded 100BaseTX ZNYX LAN adaptors for verry low-latency threaded shared openGL rendering; I use as Chromium 3D videowalls, by using XFree86 4.3 and Utah-GLX's nVidia openGLX driver.

        And yes, Quake3 looks hot!

      • OOOOH..... linguistic pet peeve (Score:4, Funny)

        by SubliminalLove ( 646840 ) on Saturday July 03, 2004 @09:59PM (#9603594)
        Can you literally run something on a shoe-string budget? What, exactly, can you get in exchange for a shoestring? Or did you mean a budget literally equal to the value of a shoestring?

        Drives me nuts every time someone says 'literally' to modify a phrase that it is literally impossible to construe in any way but figuratively.

        ~Sub

        -1 Troll
        -1 Flamebait
        +1 Linguistic Merit
        +1 Crankiness
    • hell, just use some old s3's or something.

      barely any heat...
    • Only one of the 4 videocards can use AGP, so the other 3 must be (probably fanless) PCI cards, those don't generate too much heat.
      Just think about 3D intensive games, where both top notch CPUs and videocards are running on full load. It produces much more heat but it still can be handled. (Though the newer videocards are getting loud.)
    • I have an Nvidia twinhead AGP card and single PCI card in an Athlon right now. That is 3/4 of what they are doing as regards heat. Not a problem, but I would spread out the PCI cards if they were full-size, e.g. put the next PCI graphics card in the bottom slot, as far from the AGP as possible, and only little ones like the network card in between, to allow good airflow.

      My machine has been running for a few weeks and is not noticeably hot, however they are not the latest state of the art graphics cards, esp

    • In Brazil? (Score:3, Funny)

      by leonbrooks ( 8043 )
      They'd handle it with water cooling [etravelphotos.com].

  • Economy? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Where's the economy in this? The "box" (cpu/ps/hdd) is relatively cheap compared to the display. I guess every dollar/peso/dinar counts.

    • Re:Economy? (Score:3, Informative)

      by TheOtherAgentM ( 700696 )
      That's not completely true. Since I'm not a Linux user, I'm not sure what kind of power a box would require to run something like this, but CRTs are only $100-150. Correct me if I am misspeaking, but I don't think you can buy a tower for anywhere near this price. The keyboard and mouse are pretty inexpensive. Would the video card have to push a lot of processing power? If so, maybe that's where the cost would even out, since there's so many video cards out that cost nearly as much as whole systems.
    • Very true. I've seen prices of about 350 ($640-ish) for a complete system, of a fairly respectable performance. That's amazing considering getting a whole PC for that price was impossible not too long ago.

      Maybe this project is more a proof of concept? Somebody did produce cards which did this anyway with PS/2 connectors, VGA and even sound cards. This was a few years back, and you don't see them now PCs are so rediculously cheap.

    • Re:Economy? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Texas Rose on Lava L ( 712928 ) on Saturday July 03, 2004 @03:34PM (#9601605) Homepage Journal
      These guys aren't using 21-inch flat panel monitors. A 17-inch monitor costs around $100 or so [google.com]. Mice, keyboards, etc. are cheap. If the boxes are $300, plus $150 for a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, they're reducing the cost of 4 computers from $1800 to $900. This would mean they could support twice as many users without increasing the budget.

      Also, boxes need replacing more often than monitors, so you get even more cost savings later on.

  • This is new? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Aero Leviathan ( 698882 ) on Saturday July 03, 2004 @03:14PM (#9601465) Journal
    Wasn't this what Unix (and/or its predecessor, Multics) was designed for?
    • This just in: MIT has released a windowing system that allows for multiple users on a time-sharing system to use GUI applications across a network.

      Seriously though, this is cool. It leverages the often unused computing power of workstations that are traditionally used as thin clients so that processing can be done. Definitely a cool project using cheap hardware and free software.

    • Re:This is new? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Nope this is not new at all.

      However running multiple instances of X on a single computer is pretty new. Before you had seperate machines that acted as X terminals that had their own low-power proccessor and video card for driving the gui and their own keyboard and mouse. Then those plugged in thru the network and into the computer that way.

      With this method you simply attatch the monitors and keyboards to a single machine and share the resources that way.

      More direct and a bigger pain in the arse. PC's wer

      • Re:This is new? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by djcapelis ( 587616 )
        > However running multiple instances of X on a single computer is pretty new.

        Is it? My computer is running 3 right now... I use them to allow me to keep my work as one user while graphically logging in as another, or allowing others to login to the computer without me having to disturb my desktop environments.

      • Re:This is new? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by isj ( 453011 )
        However running multiple instances of X on a single computer is pretty new.

        No it isn't. The first server listens at port 6000, the second server listens on port 6001, and so on. You specify which server to use with the DISPLAY variable (or the -display parameter) x.x.x.x:y.z where y is the server number. Multiple displays has been supported by X for a long time. Multiple input devices have been at bit less supported, but I guess that some of the CAD engineers early in the '90 have used it.

        Virtual display

    • Re:This is new? (Score:5, Informative)

      by jmv ( 93421 ) on Saturday July 03, 2004 @03:48PM (#9601674) Homepage
      Not exactly, they were designed for multiple users, but not multiple mouse/keyboard/screen. Actually, I'm not even sure UNIX/MULTICS were even designed to have a keyboard or a screen, let alone a mouse.

  • This has been done a long time ago... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 03, 2004 @03:15PM (#9601472)
    This has been done a long time ago...
    http://cambuca.ldhs.cetuc.puc-rio.br/multi user/

    But if one uses XGGI, its easy to get eight or more users on a single PC.

    - A.C.

  • 1975 called (Score:4, Funny)

    by Chairboy ( 88841 ) on Saturday July 03, 2004 @03:18PM (#9601495) Homepage
    Hi there,

    1975 called. They want their computer headlines back.

    Best regards,

    Chairboy

    • Re:1975 called (Score:5, Funny)

      by ed__ ( 23481 ) on Saturday July 03, 2004 @03:43PM (#9601649) Journal
      1997 called; they want their joke back.

    • 2004 called (Score:2, Informative)

      by twitter ( 104583 )
      Microsoft still could not do this.

      Well, you can [anandtech.com], but it's third party, very hardware specific [jetway.com.tw] and leaves you stuck with M$ XP. The Linux system demonstrated is a clear winner for schools, libraries, banks, casinos and other places where economical use of hardware is desired. While the Linux system might be difficult to maintain, it can be done. The Windoze solution leaves you dependent on the vendor. The people at Jetway have done an outstanding job but such is the world of proprietary software.

      Anyon

  • Multi-headed Computer (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pantherace ( 165052 ) on Saturday July 03, 2004 @03:19PM (#9601498)
    I have looked at this... the problem is the way Linux handles the keyboard... To Linux, all keyboards are the same. If there was some way to either tell X to ignore all KBs except some, or have the kernel map them (say /dev/input/kb0 /dev/input/kb1) similar to how mice are done, this would not be a problem at all.

    Also, you don't need 4 cards, You could do it with two. NVidia's twinview allows you to run two seperate X-servers off of one card (provided of course that it has two outputs).

    • From what I've read, one of the biggest problems is a dreadful non standardization of USB keyboards and the way they report devices. Some, with those stupid shopping cart and music playing buttons, can report up to five separate devices and the Xserver and kernel have to to be hacked as the site specifies. Problems are reduced by using the same keyboard and I'll bet that the PS/2 keyboards are easier to deal with.

      Also, you don't need 4 cards, You could do it with two. NVidia's twinview allows you to run

    • Re:Multi-headed Computer (Score:5, Interesting)

      by plaa ( 29967 ) <sampo.niskanenNO@SPAMiki.fi> on Saturday July 03, 2004 @03:57PM (#9601720) Homepage
      Not relating directly to the above, but I think this may interest some people:

      When I got a dualhead card, I knew that I wanted two separate desktops, between which I can switch with a hotkey, not by scrolling the mouse to the other display (I wanted to use virtual desktops on both). I was astounded that I could find absolutely no way of doing this, and no references to it on the Net.

      The best I could do was make the screens separate and stop the mouse from going from the edge of one display to another, but then I found no way of moving the pointer to the other screen.

      After a few months I found a suitable function call in the X libraries and wrote a small program, switchscreen [www.iki.fi], to switch between the displays. Now I've got two totally separate desktops between which I can move with a simple alt-tab.

      You can read the details for configuring your X system like this in the README file included in the package.
      • Mandrake 10.0 allows you to run multiple X sessions out of the box. Maybe you should look at it. It is really cool.

    • I think that is covered in the article, although I did not read through too much of the headache-inducing computer-translated Porgrish.

      Yes, but with four cards, each with two outputs, you could have eight users! Although that would probably be too much use for all but email and word processing. You can probably do something similar with Matrox cards, I think they have a quad-output card or something crazy like that. Anyway, the dual-head cards are probably much more expensive than two low end single-head

    • Re:Multi-headed Computer (Score:3, Informative)

      by barawn ( 25691 )
      I have looked at this... the problem is the way Linux handles the keyboard... To Linux, all keyboards are the same. If there was some way to either tell X to ignore all KBs except some, or have the kernel map them (say /dev/input/kb0 /dev/input/kb1) similar to how mice are done, this would not be a problem at all.

      Ah, young Jedi, but there is a way...

      Ruby, or Backstreet Ruby [tldp.org].

      Note that this was in the article, though the link for Backstreet Ruby here [times.lv] is down - probably Slashdotted.

      Beauty of open source.
      • This is probably going to make me sound like I'm a really old bearded hacker, whereas in reality, my sig said "Linux newbie asks for help in his journal" up to a few months ago...

        Nevertheless, it should be noted that Ruby needs to be grabbed from CVS, some instructions here [sourceforge.net]. Most of that is about the 2.4 backport, called backstreet ruby, but you'll get the 2.6 code along with it.

  • Translation (Score:2, Redundant)

    by sploo22 ( 748838 )
    Google doesn't do a particularly good translation of Portuguese computer jargon - it refers to Nvidia "plates", a "plate mother", PS/2 "doors", "slide bars" (I assume these are expansion slots) and the list goes on and on.

  • My favorite line (Score:5, Funny)

    by Froze ( 398171 ) on Saturday July 03, 2004 @03:19PM (#9601501)
    Initially it is necessary to catch the code source of kernel 2.4.25. Makes it sound like an adventure.

  • Been there, done that (Score:4, Funny)

    by Haydn Fenton ( 752330 ) <no.spam.for.haydn@gmail.com> on Saturday July 03, 2004 @03:21PM (#9601515)
    Heh, there was once a time where I had three mice (only 1 cursor though) - I had a normal PS2 mouse plugged in, an old COM port (I think.. never been too sure what port it was) mouse and a wireless USB mouse all plugged in at the same time, and they could all control the cursor.

    Hehe, it was good for playing tricks on my parents when they were sitting at the desk with the PS2 mouse and I'm sitting a few feet behind them with the handy wireless USB mouse.
    *evillaugh*
    • >mouse and a wireless USB mouse all plugged in
      >at the same time, and they could all control
      >the cursor.

      Plugging in a wireless mouse kinda defeats the purpose, don't you think? :-D

    • Heh, there was once a time where I had three mice (only 1 cursor though) - I had a normal PS2 mouse plugged in, an old COM port (I think.. never been too sure what port it was) mouse and a wireless USB mouse all plugged in at the same time, and they could all control the cursor.

      This bit's talking about having four displays, four keyboards and four mice, where each mouce/keyboard pair controls a separate desktop/display. Completely different thing from just sticking a few more InputDevice-sections in the
    • The article is talking about having four separate cursors. So you have your wireless mouse, but it controls a different cursor on another screen.

      Related question: anyone know if it's possible to set up something where you could have those mice be associated with different cursors (by color or shape) so more than one person can work at the same computer? I'm not talking about the article's described system, but between it and a typical computer. One display, multiple cursors.

      (Each cursor can keep a separat

  • Been there, done that (Score:5, Funny)

    by Uninen ( 746304 ) on Saturday July 03, 2004 @03:21PM (#9601524) Homepage

    Man, this is old news. We did this few years ago with five or more people on one machine. All we needed was a really small computer class, some free chairs, one PC, one keyboard, one mouse and one display.

    Fastest (or strongest) got the best seats and the one with specs got the keyboard.

    Talking about multi-tasking...

  • Considering how we're all supposed to be moving to web based interfaces rather than rich clients, wouldn't the old dumb terminal method suit us better.

    Perhaps a method were PCs, ACT like dumb terminals. They are some kind of 'Resource' or extra limb of one 'Computer', running unix?

    Might do a hell of a lot to improve security and administration in the long run.
    • All you need for this is a network card supporting network booting. You have a separate root nfs share for each system, and you load the kernel across the network. There is a linux kernel option for network autoconfiguration, by which the kernel will get an IP and set boot options via DHCP without a user space agent, as well as mount the nfs root. Then init runs and the rest of your boot process proceeds as normal.

      Alternately you can have a small system installed on the machine itself (you could put it on

    • i think you might have missed a memo or two.
    • Considering how we're all supposed to be moving to web based interfaces...

      After twenty five years of computing, I'm starting to get real tired of people telling me what I am supposed to do.
  • I would love to do this, but with only 2 users instead of 4. Anyone know of a good guide that shows how the configuration of a second desktop would be done? I can see this as being an Xfree86 configuration nightmare.
  • So I guess four heads are better than one eh?

    (ba-dum-ching!)

    (ducks impending flame doom)

  • Wow, lots of dumb responses... (Score:5, Informative)

    by benjamindees ( 441808 ) on Saturday July 03, 2004 @03:27PM (#9601571) Homepage
    Ranging from:

    'xterminals are cheaper' -- anyone care to back that up?

    to:

    'Windows terminal services can do this' -- don't know where to start on that one, suffice it to say: it can't.

    to:

    'This is just serial terminals' -- it isn't. RTFA.

    I'm sure I missed a few...
    • Pretty sad isn't it.

      Slashdot needs new moderation options such as:

      -1 Didn't RTFA.

      -1 Don't be so negative.

      The negative comments really bug me. There is a difference between being critical and dumping on someone's work.

      ontopic: I had wanted to do this last year to share a home computer. At the time the needed patches were not stable enough. It is good to see that it works now.

    • Re:Wow, lots of dumb responses... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Saturday July 03, 2004 @06:10PM (#9602517) Homepage
      'xterminals are cheaper' -- anyone care to back that up?

      Sure :-)

      I buy NCD explora 701's and 402's all day long at $10.00 each the local community college was donated about 10,000 of the things and has no idea what to do with them. I have been buying lot's of 10 at $10.00 each and selling them to clients on the side. I also see them as well as the newer ones on ebay for around that price and up to $20.00 each. add a 15 inch monitor which can also be had for dirt (and has the EXACT same cost as this 4 head setup btw...) oh and keyboard, mouse. (same ,same) and a 100 base switch + a second 100 base ethernet card in the "server"

      I can add a workstation to a P-4 class server for around $75.00 each. that includes a new 15 inch monitor, mouse and keyboard + the ncd 701 terminal. each P-4 (1.2ghz) can handle about 10 users comfortably. and if you get 701 explora's or use old Pentium 233MMX machines, you get accelerated video playback (and most ALL xterminals support sound.) and seperate sound for EACH terminal... something that is not available on this 4 head setup.

      the best way to actually set up a school full of x terminals is to have 3 servers... 1 for boot/ network management, 1 for 1/2 the apps and 1 for user login + storage and the rest of the apps.
      using this setup we were able to install about 100 xterminals for a christian school for around $10,000.00US not including the wiring of the CAT-5e... that labor was donated by someone else.

      so if you can show me that you can do it that cheaply (and yes, I make a profit at $75.00 each station... $39.00 each for gateway monitors, $10.00 each for the NCD terminals, $10.00 for cheap mouse and keyboard. that's $20.00 profit per station fro me) even at less than 100 units... my savings starts when the first pc is purchased. today's computers are horribly over-powered.

  • Benefit? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by div_2n ( 525075 ) on Saturday July 03, 2004 @03:36PM (#9601618)
    Ok, so by the time you spend all of the time and effort to do all of this, you could deploy a fully self contained thin client in what, 10 minutes?

    The only way I see this as a good idea for any low budget organization is if they get donated lots and lots of monitors, keyboards, mice and computers with graphics cards for this project.

  • Great gamer machine. No latency! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Saturday July 03, 2004 @03:42PM (#9601645) Homepage
    This sounds like a multiplayer gamer configuration. Unlike most shared-CPU systems, everybody has a 3D video card, although they have to be PCI boards. With everybody on the same CPU, latency is a non-issue. Fast FPS games should synchronize perfectly. That tightly synchronized feel will make for much better head to head gameplay.
    • Also known as a console.
  • just the other day I was thinking how I could do something like this... all you need is each tty with its own $DISPLAY variable for X

  • Diversity is good (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Darth Cider ( 320236 ) on Saturday July 03, 2004 @03:44PM (#9601656)
    Observations that "this has been done before" are really missing an important point, that it's being done in a new way. When there are hundreds of software solutions for everything, all for free, then there will cease to be a market for overpriced proprietary solutions. Not only that, but instead of thinking "where can I buy ___," the first thought to come to mind will be "where can I get this in Open Source."
    • Observations that "this has been done before" are really missing an important point, that it's being done in a new way.

      I think there is cynicism about this because it does not appear to be a scalable way of doing things; after all, there are only so many video cards you can plug into a PC, yet with dedicated X terminals, or even low-end PCs running X-servers, you could run a whole classroom off 1 reasonably specified Linux server. Managing that single server is probably going to be a lot simpler. With
    • Well, it's not quite a "new way", there was a company selling video-mouse-keyboard cards and software that let you do this with SCO Xenix back in the late '80s and early '90s.

      But, yes, this is a good thing. I've been wishing I could do this at home, actually, because each PC means another heat source the A/C has to deal with.

  • What's curious... (Score:3, Informative)

    by SharpFang ( 651121 ) on Saturday July 03, 2004 @03:48PM (#9601678) Homepage Journal
    multiple comments that mention this was being done for years are all true - for Linux. Serial terminals, remote X access, VNC, network boot, diskless workstations, all that stuff depended on ancient (though still great) UNIX multi-user multi-session framework - multiple users work on the same machine at the same time.

    And now Microsoft woke up.

    After NEXT, GECOS and a couple others, PC has a GUI! Windows 1.0! Years after Amiga with real multitasking introduces Task Switching and later ('95) first Multitasking. Then the puny '98 "multi-user" (Amiga had that some 5 years earlier, UNIX machines way before that). And now, in 2004 we hear that after users of XP are tired of the pseudo-multisession of Switch User, SP2 is to include REAL MULTISESSIONING! Yeah, right! Two users can work on the same computer at the same time! Yay!
    Noticed the catch? The keyword is "two". Yeah. Two sessions ought to be enough...
  • A reseach group from UFPR university in Brazil, C3SL has managed to make one Linux box run four terminals at the same time

    Oh. My. G0D.

  • Could it be that windows doesn't support multiple monitors? No.

    Or that it can't support 4 different users on them (as opposed to 1 user getting a big display)? Probably not, at the very least, it would be hackable.

    Maybe it can't support multiple keyboards, or mice? Again, the most it would need is some hacking.

    Or maybe, just maybe, if you posted a webpage, telling someone how to use a single windows license for 4 users, M$ legal would go apeshit on you, and stomp you into a tiny, tiny greasestain?
    BINGO!!

  • 60 users on 15 PC's - try 60 users on an 8MB VAX (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stanwirth ( 621074 ) on Saturday July 03, 2004 @07:13PM (#9602870)

    Has computing gone forwards or backwards when it takes thousands of times the compute power to support fewer users, doing dumber things. We used to run whole research departments developing mathematical modelling, computational physics programmes on a single DEC VAX 11/750 with 8 MB of main memory and like 80 MB of hard disk space. It was so underutilised that astrophysics would rent out time on the darn thing to geophysics and chemistry.

    This was on 4.2 BSD, the mother of all open source operating systems. And we had access to supercomputers at Argonne, NCAR, LANL, LBL and Cornell over the ARPAnet. in the freaking early 1980's.

    AND we produced beautifully typeset scholarly papers and theses, full of equations using TeX. Try doing that with Office. Hnf.

    Personally, I used to use maple to do the algebraic manipulations, and export to either fortran (to run a numerical simulation to get the results that formed my thesis) or to TeX (in order to publish it). Sure as hell can't do that with the stupid Office (open or MS) programmes you need 15 64MB computers to support only 60 users on in this model. Even if you insist on running a pointy-clicky GUI, with X10 we used to run dozens of graphics terminals off of one VAX

    This article just proves that the net progress of computing is actually backwards because the computers certainly are getting bigger/faster/better more slowly than the intelligence and creativity of the users -- now they all need a GUI just to edit text and compile programs. To the point that it's a miracle when you can have more than one person using a computer at a time now. Sheesh!

    • Well, this would be comparable today to giving a bunch of users accounts and allowing them to use telnet or ssh to get to a shell account. In a setting like that, I bet your average computer today would support hundreds if not thousands of simultaneous users. With X terminals, I bet you could have a bunch of gui interfaces too.

      This is a lot different than that - this is about taking an interface that has been designed assuming there is one user in front of it, and hacking it to support multiple users. M
    • Even if you insist on running a pointy-clicky GUI, with X10 we used to run dozens of graphics terminals off of one VAX

      Yes, but the X server was running on the terminals. The X apps running on the VAX only sent X primitives down the wire to the terminals, and the terminal bore the burdon of rendering stuff on the screen and processing kb/mouse input, turning them into events to send down the wire back to the app running on the VAX.
      This article is about plugging the monitors/kbs/mices directly into the box

  • My first home computer (Score:3, Informative)

    by SmoothTom ( 455688 ) <Tomas@TiJiL.org> on Saturday July 03, 2004 @08:50PM (#9603253) Homepage
    My very first home computer was a Radio Shack TRS 16B+ in the mid 1980's.

    It had a Z80 CPU to handle I/O housekeeping chores and an MC68000 main CPU running XENIX (a flavor of UNIX).

    It supported four users at the same time - each at their own terminal - with no additional goodies needed at the 16B+.

    Mine did have a full load of memory, a larger hard drive, and a few Hayes modems so the other users could be remote, but the modems hooked right into the existing multiple ports on the machine.

    For several years it was a minor mail and news server on the web (named tijil).

    In what major way it this "new" thing astonishingly different from what I had 20 years ago on my desktop at home?

    Take care,
    Tomas

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