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Comment by fredsmith219 | Hacker News Reader

I was running OpenVMS on VAX machines in that era. I couldn’t figure out why DEC wanted NT, a single user operating system, for their mini computers. It made no sense to me. As an aside I had an OpenVMS gig as recently as 2020. It was fun to dust off my old DCL skills.

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> I couldn’t figure out why DEC wanted NT, a single user operating system, for their mini computers.

When did you figure out that NT wasn't a single user operating system?

NT's support for multiplexed interactive user sessions is piss-poor and has always come with a CAL restriction that was _absurd_. To this day there's no real "multiuser on consoles". (Yes yes, Citrix, rdp, Powershell Remoting, OpenSSH: compare those with X and, I guess, also SSH, and they suck.)

I'm not sure what the requirement for purchasing CALs has to do with whether an OS is multi-user or not. I have administered or been a user of interactive remote NT user session systems going back to beta testing the initial release of WinFrame in the mid 90's. Although worlds better today, I would not have called it pisspoor even then. Today RDS is much more capable than X on a unix system.

As someone else in that space in the mid 90s I would agree that it was pretty remarkable nearly 30 years ago, especially considering the competition.

As far as I know NT 4 was not able to have 2 users logged on at the same time. So it was not a multiuser system.

A request for an official answer on CALs for Microsofts' SSH port is about to turn 6 years old:

https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/issues/926

While MS licensing is shitty, there is nothing ambigous there, it's the same as everything else there, be it RDP, SMB or Apache.

If you use the User CAL model then any user can have any amount of connections from any amount of devices used by the same user.

If you have 100 employees using SSH (or Apache or whatever) - you need to license 100 User CALs.

Windows supports much richer remote access than anything built on X. I can log in using standard graphical login, my keyboard layouts carry over, audio is transparently handled, the screen size isn't tied to the existence of a remote monitor and 3d acceleration just works. And all that works out of the box with no setup necessary other than enabling it.

On Linux, the only workflow I could get working was to use x11vnc to control an existing local session. To log in, I have to run x11vnc as root, pass it some magic cookie (I have no idea what that is still, but some magic incantation from SO did the trick), then once I log in, the running x11vnc dies, and I have to restart it as a regular user to control the session I just authenticated.

You can just "ssh -X" into your remote server, then run an app. SSH will configure X authentication for you (the "magic cookie stuff") and set up the "DISPLAY" environment variable to forward X11 connections over an encrypted tunnel. The app will display on your local desktop. It will even work on a Mac, if you install XQuartz.

you've never seen remote X, it was a decade ahead of RDP

RDP is great. It works fluidly over 56k modems. X “sucks” as it could never do that.

This argument works both ways.

False, I've done remote XDMCP in the early 2000s and it worked well on dial up.

I have an Alpha here with OpenVMS! It's fun to play around with. VMS was the first multi-user system I had access to, way back when I was a teenager in the late 80's.

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