Starlink from 1984 | Hacker News Reader

Starlink from 1984

nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com

70 pointsingve36 comments

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 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 ..

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.

Nowadays it’s even easier.

Add a pair of video cards and USB cards, pass one of each to a VM.

Will feel like having 2-3 native PCs!

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.

Actually it was released in 1989. People’s memories are a funny thing…

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.

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).

While true, modern implementations use hardware blocks for acceleration AND for just terminals, with spare displays, you'll likely be using lower resolutions at lower refresh rates.

We've used a series of n150 based mini PCs (priced at $200 each) to power three dashboard displays at the same time. I guess it's a matter of calculating power usage and figuring out how that translates over 4 years

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.

Forget the terminal - do it with an FPGA!

I'm guessing it's called StarLink because the design uses a Star network topology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_network

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.

This is a great demonstration of why trademarks aren't forever or universal, and shouldn't be.

Is that related to StarLAN?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarLAN

In the “the name got reused” section the article missed the Subaru usage of it.

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.

Starlink was also a UK astronomy software project from the 80s and 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_Project

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

The vast majority of app's RAM usage requirements kinda stalled in last few years. It's just AI that needs it in gobbles

How did it work? As I know DOS wasn't even a proper operating system, there were no separate processes, only single running task. So, how was it possible for multiple users to run multiple programs in parallel?

You are describing MS-DOS. As article states, this used DRI's Concurrent DOS, which was basically rebranded MP/M-86 with a basic MS-DOS compatibility layer.

More about Concurrent DOS, eg here: https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/i/196574463/quest-for...

StarLAN was a 1Mb twisted pair networking system that was pre twisted pair ethernet

I honestly thought this would be about Teledesic!

This was interesting. I am new to the tech/deve world and I am finding a lot of useful info here although some of it is a little hard to understand.

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

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 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.

You could have more luck with AIO PCs.

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

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

> 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.

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.

Actually trivial now.

Just add a video card and USB card for each head/terminal and pass them into a VM!

(It’s a shame combo video+USB cards don’t exist - would save on slots)

I’ll need a moment to let this sink in.

It’s not just technology, it’s a movement.

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