Bupkus said:
> How did those old mini computers provide dumb terminals without their
> own processor?  I think it would be really cool to have one computer,
> motherboard, ps, cpu, memory, etc and three stations. My guess is
> today's hardware is powerful enough to support it.
>

Dumb terminals recieved a stream of characters for display and control of
the display.  They had enough electronics in them to interpret a limited
set of control bytes, display the text on the screen and accept input from
the keyboard to send back over the serial line.

The problem with terminals is not the power of the host CPU.  You are
correct that any current computer can handle more than one user.  The
issue is providing the infrastructure needed to display the data and
accept input from the user.

The best Linux based solution to accomplish this is LTSP, as pointed out
in a previous email.  Use old PCs without a hard drive, CD-ROM or even a
floppy drive and minimal RAM.  The old PC is there to provide the
infrastructure for the user interface (video card and keyboard and mouse
ports) and that is all.  The programs run on the server with the
information for display and input traveling on the network connection
instead of a serial cable.  You can buy diskless workstations if you don't
want to use an old PC.

The place to go to learn how it works now in the Linux is
http://k12ltsp.org/contents.html.  They took the LTSP project and molded
it to an easy to install distro for schools but it very appropriate for
business or home use too.  They have full instructions on how to set it up
and descriptions of all the hardware that works with it.

Alan



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