Starlink from 1984

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 ..

I honestly thought this would be about Teledesic!

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