Lets reinvent the wheel - not!

Has anyone else notice the great excitment about the ability to share a computer between multiple users? Here's one article from Wired that complains how HP wont be selling its four user Linux system in the USA.

Well excuse me but I find all this fuss about sharing machines most entertaining. At the risk of sounding like an old timer I would like to point out that in my first job out of college there were three HP machines shared by the entire engineering staff of twenty or so. No this wasn't back in the old days of punch cards and core memory either. This was a mere fourteen years ago in 1990 and believe me these were not super powerful machines with tons of memory and disk. They were just low-end HP Unix boxes with a processor no more powerful than your average 486 (think before Pentium!), maybe 16Mb of memory if we were lucky, a few hundred megs of disk storage, and a bunch of keyboards and screens (also known as "terminals") dangling off them.

Lets face it, most people spend most of their time doing mundane tasks like reading and writing email, reading and writing text documents and surfing the web (well back then there was no WWW so it was mostly doing FTP and reading USENET). None of these require massive amounts of horsepower and even real software development such as compilation and debugging could occur in parallel with such activities.

A long time ago the Unix world recognized the utility of giving users a way to share a machine and have a graphical user experience and hence networked windowing systems like "X" were developed. From that the concept of a low power but graphical "X terminal" connected to a more powerful shared server was introduced. These days an X terminal could be a very low power machine - even a humble $200 PocketPC could act as one and equivalent computing power of an X terminal could easily be built directly into a regular LCD monitor/keyboard combination for very little. This would have more than enough utility for web browsing, document reading and editing, software development and indeed, almost all common domestic and education uses except gaming and high end graphical visualization.

I really wonder why we have to go through this "invention" of the notion of sharing a computer again? Just bring back the X terminal and apply todays cheap hardware and economies of scale to make them a $200 item, or at least no more expensive than the screen and keyboard attached to them.