Sage and a glimpse of group computing from before the PC

The idea of group computing, and computer mediated communications in a group setting, is an interesting fork in the road that needs more exploration. Along with the Memex, it seems there were some low hanging fruit just past the area where we stopped exploring that could still be useful today.

I had dual-screens before I got to college- an extra Matrox Millenium II stuffed into my computer, another 19" crt. I built a projector out of an LCD display & would have some friends playing PS2 on that via video-input, while others would hang out on the main computer & surf or play games. It felt like ubiquotous computing was going to spread & spread. I always wanted to follow up, to have more and more input & output attached to a computer, more simultaenous users, but my social world got less active, less hang out & chill in a basement with a bunch of people. Alas!

Anyhow, I remember being jazzed beyond belief for Peter Hutterer pushing Multi-Pointer-X. This was going to be the pinnacle of computing. I wanted so much to play here. Still haven't done anything in this realm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-Pointer_X

I still think buying a 4K (or more!) 65" display or whatever & having two or three people do parallel play- do their own thing, but on a shared desktop- and occasioally use the shared real estate to share/bounce ideas, pair- I still think that'd be the bee's knees.

I'm not sure how this really acts as a precursor to the personal computer. It's one of the first time-sharing systems. That's something else in its own right, and something which can be independent of what the hardware was designed for.