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Comment by tidbeck | Hacker News Reader

It is really hard to find on the site what kvm stands for. Guess people going there knows what it stands for but think it could be spelled out once at least.

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Not to be taken in a bad way but, so many people wondering "what is a KVM" is telling a lot about HN reader base evolution.

It used to be a time that any proper geek/hacker would obviously know what a KVM is. More the normal KVM than the IP-KVM that could be considered a marvel of our time in the end.

Because it was so common to have just a single screen and keyboard but multiple tower desktop computers. Especially at school and home. Nowadays we mostly all use laptops so it is well irrelevant and I guess only a few young reader ever saw one in the field.

At the beginning of my career, it was typical to have servers in the office, either in a server closet, or in a proper server room. Even if we had servers off-site, the development infrastructure was often still local. It was typical for experienced developers to know how to do basic "physical" maintenance. I was a system administrator before I was a developer, so often I was the one who ended up doing it. I imagine many HN readers remember those days. I miss it a bit!

Warning: Don't browse their documentation site, it's filled with domain-specific jargon like FPS, BIOS, LAN, HDMI and other things, and not a single one is explained first! They should clearly read "Product Websites for Dummies" again.

Actually yes, why not? All the professional documentation has glossary in it, btw.

If you click the “docs” button on this page the definition of KVM and the purpose of the product explained immediately.

It's an aposematism. Everything working as intended

Even if not intended, it is a good method of keeping support levels to a reasonable minimum.

Just click the “docs” button at the top and the concept is explained in the first paragraph.

Agreed, except for "just". To me a KVM is a physical switch for 2 computers to share the same wired peripherals. It took me 4 different tries to find a page which explained what this one is.

Keyboard Video Mouse... It's such a weird TLA that it's not felt to be worth explaining or remembering

TLA ?

Three Letter Acronym

LMGTFY

Three Letter Acronym

Except it’s an initialism

TLI

Three Letter Acronym

It’s a YABA

> Yet Another Bloody Acronym

ha. I guess I'm one of today's lucky 10000[1].

1: https://xkcd.com/1053/

Well I came here thinking this would be about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine .

The worst part is that there's two different KVM concepts that are pretty different. One is to bridge keyboard/video/mouse over the network to a target computer (IP KVM), and the other one is to quickly switch keyboard/video/mouse between multiple computers (KVM switch).

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