alt Hacker NewsIn 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.