Thanks for the many ideas. It gives me a lot to look into. It seems like a fiber optic bus interconnect will allow GUI terminals to be widely spaced. It also seems like the RAMDAC (graphics card) is the core of the terminal. PCI digital bus speed is in the cheap optical fiber range. Some fun electronics. But the software remains out of my reach. Linux is the only OS with open development, but I struggle with Visual Basic. Thanks for the brainstorm. -----Original Message----- From: Mike Hicks [SMTP:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu] Sent: Monday, April 23, 2001 5:12 PM To: tclug-list at mn-linux.org Subject: Re: [TCLUG] question; re-invent an old idea ? "Brian" <lxy at cloudnet.com> wrote: > > Cool idea! Actually, in hindsight I think they had it right in the 70s. > Heck of a lot easier to administer than a bunch of PCs all over the > building. So I can see why you're wondering. It CAN be done but I've > never done it. Well, one easy way to do this is to set up a server with xdm, gdm, or whatever you like, and have it broadcast its presence via XDMCP or whatever. Then make some bare-bones client systems that have X, run `X -query my.server.org' and they should work as X terminals. Of course, there are lots of different way to get essentially the same result.. I put down some thoughts on this earlier today here: http://advogato.org/person/Mulad/diary.html?start=89 Essentially, Windows sucks for this sort of thing. I'm not sure if Microsoft even cares about it (they should). Unix, as has been said, is pretty much designed to work this way. If you want to go nuts with it, you could even get to the point of doing distributed systems like Plan 9 (which I should really try out sometime, if I can ever find an installation of it..) -- _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ ___ _ _ __ I'm an absolute, / \/ \(_)| ' // ._\ / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__ off-the-wall fanatical \_||_/|_||_|_\\___/ \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __) moderate. [ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ] _______________________________________________ tclug-list mailing list tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list