Starlink from 1984

https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/starlink-from-1984

by ingve • 11 days ago

70 36 11 days ago

nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com

tristanj• 6 days ago

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

daniela-vera• 6 days ago

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.

inigyou3• 5 days ago

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

nticompass• 5 days ago

Is that related to StarLAN?

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

verzali• 6 days ago

I honestly thought this would be about Teledesic!

Krishnaswaroop• 6 days ago

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

healthworker2• 6 days ago

You didn't read the article. This has nothing to do with satellite-delivered Internet.

aa-jv3• 6 days ago

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 ..

alibarber• 6 days ago

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

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

natch• 6 days ago

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

healthworker2• 6 days ago

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.

jeroenhd• 6 days ago

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.

numpad0• 6 days ago

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).

walrus01• 5 days ago

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.

BobbyTables23• 5 days ago

Forget the terminal - do it with an FPGA!

xioxox• 6 days ago

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

vednig• 6 days ago

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

PunchyHamster• 6 days ago

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

aa-jv3• 6 days ago

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 ..

brk• 5 days ago

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.

BobbyTables23• 5 days ago

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!

nizmow• 5 days ago

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.

whobre2• 4 days ago

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

Taniwha• 6 days ago

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

RajT88• 5 days ago

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.

Panzerschrek• 5 days ago

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?

whobre2• 4 days ago

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...

DevPulse• 4 days ago

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.

Starlink from 1984

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