7 Users on 1 PC! - but is it legal?

there's a technological concept that i talk about with friends a lot that we call the plateau this is the notion of a period in history where people don't have to upgrade their computers for surprisingly long periods i mean i can tell you that going all the way back to the 80s there's been this recurring joke that hey a computer is obsolete as soon as you open the box it was in weird al yankovic's it's all about the pentiums right this has been a meme since like boomers were young it just keeps going but is it really true well it all depends on what you do with your computer if you keep doing the same stuff that you always did a lot of computers will last a very long time the trouble is that people tend to actually change what they're doing and they don't want to admit it or they don't notice it if you're editing standard definition video then a computer from 2003 that was good at that then will still be good at it now but you probably don't do that right you probably started editing hd video or you started doing more with sd video than you ever did back then if you really truly stick with the same tasks you always did computers last an awful long time i used to work pc recycle and i cannot tell you how many people came in in 2011 with machines they bought in 2003 that had just died and that's the only reason they were replacing them i've gotten comments on my videos before from people upset that i upload in 4k 60 because youtube doesn't produce a 60fps version that they can watch on their computer from 2010 i'm sorry i can't help you without hurting everyone else but it's interesting that this is apparently the first thing they've encountered that has made them think that they should maybe upgrade their 12 year old computer that means that whatever they were doing 12 years ago is probably still what they're doing now and the same applies to anyone who doesn't change what they're doing if you're just writing books for instance if you use your computer for a word processor then you don't need one from the last 12 years or 20 years or 30 years you can get an original macintosh from 1984. it'll do everything you want if you really are just writing books you could use a pentium with word 95 and it would be massive overkill you ever looked at word 95 it's absurd how much it can do you can put in full color images you can generate tables you can embed editable spreadsheets you can put in form fields and auto populated template values and the headers and footers you can generate tables of contents automatically it's obscene how much power word 95 had compared to what the average individual did with it and in the last 20 years i've been hard-pressed to figure out what microsoft is adding in each release other than a much worse ui so that's an example of a plateau computers got perfect at basic word processing by the mid-80s you could also say they got perfect at photo editing by the late 2000s and that they got perfect at video editing by but seriously people were editing hd video on macbooks in 2009 with imovie hd and while there have been improvements i think most folks would still be happy with that the only downside is it might not keep up with 4k video and i don't know if it works with modern codecs like h264 and h265 but most people probably don't care about that so if you're still doing what you were doing in 2009 then your macbook from 2009 will probably keep up problem is that's not really how most of us work is it many of the people watching this video are like me we don't do one or two things with our computers we do 50 and we want to do them all at once we always want to do the newest thing right that of course pushes us to get better and better machines so we can start doing stuff that we weren't doing eight years ago or 15 years ago and then on top of everything there's of course the internet even if you really do spend most of your time writing you probably can't escape from the internet can you because you want to be able to go use google to do research you want to go pull up reference images on google image search and you want to be able to go to youtube to look up videos about the subjects you're writing about unless you're writing pure fiction in which case well i don't know maybe you want to look up some cool monsters almost nobody can resist the siren call of google and that's a lot of what keeps us on the upgrade treadmill it's keeping up with the web if it weren't for the web and video games lots of people would still be happy with core 2 duos pentium 4's or even older machines the web itself gets more bloated every year and our operating systems are constantly getting patched and updated to support new online features or to make them more secure online the internet is almost single-handedly responsible for the skyrocketing volume of e-waste that pours into recycling centers year-round despite all this horror however my recollection is that the 2000s were actually kind of a slow period for all of this yeah the web was getting more complex but it wasn't moving all that fast and you probably reasonably could have kept a pc for most of the decade however the pentium 4 and the athlon cpu lines that launched at the beginning of the decade kept getting faster and faster and faster by orders of magnitude almost they were becoming incredibly powerful and they were outpacing the requirements of average users by leaps and bounds over and over and over so putting all this together in the mid-2000s this digital revolution is happening not just with the internet but with the prevalence of computers in general and everyone knows that these are improving the quality of life and the convenience of everything everywhere so everyone wants to get on board and of course schools in particular have a strong desire to get these in the hands of every student so they can be prepped for the coming future which as we know now was exactly what they thought it was a future where everyone is touching a computer at all times well how are you going to do it imagine you're an underfunded school in detroit or a basically unfunded school in a developing nation for instance how are you going to set up a computer lab for 12 students i mean you're going to spend somewhere between two and six thousand dollars depending on how low end you go but even if you go all the way to the bargain basement product available at the time it's going to be like a celeron 2.6 which comparatively speaking if you're just running word on it you've got so much power going to waste an interesting thing about this is that that's not how it used to be in 1989 for instance you could still buy a pc xt compatible clone based on a design from 1981 but in 2004 you couldn't buy a machine that was any older than like 2002 which was still a monster pentium 4 powerhouse so how do you get out of this pickle well one of the options of course is to buy used that was available then as it is now but of course you're getting a machine that maybe isn't in perfect health and has no warranty i don't think that dell and hp had the robust refurbished programs that they have now so that wasn't a fantastic option the conventional solution to this problem is the thin client this is basically a low-powered computer you plug it into a network it connects back to a server and that server gives it its own desktop environment running on that machine along with all the other thin clients so you've got one server that has a big cpu or multiple cpus and lots of ram and it divides up those resources among all these thin clients this saves a lot of money both up front and on maintenance however i suspect that if you're working on a low budget it probably just shuffles the dollars around and doesn't save you that much in the end to get the most out of this you want to use dedicated server hardware which in those days was a lot further away from what you could get in consumer systems than it is nowadays multi-core cpus multi-cpu sockets and much higher ram counts for instance in addition you're going to need a server operating system and this is not optional even if you want to use a consumer pc you can't connect thin clients to consumer windows so you're going to need windows server for that you can do it with linux but if you're trying to prep students for the realities of a modern office they're going to need windows and if you're trying to interoperate with other offices well in 2004 linux isn't going to fly either you're also going to need a network and those were a lot more expensive back then you didn't necessarily have one at every single building like you do now you're going to need switches and you're going to need structured cabling and you're going to need somebody to run it all and this is all noisy and produces a lot of heat so you're going to need a closet now and all of a sudden you've got all this infrastructure you have to maintain and you have to buy the thin clients at a hundred dollars or more a piece on a good day sure you could skimp in a number of places here but the point is doing this right was a complicated and expensive prospect and any money you saved up front you'd probably pay in triplicate later on now i'm not really qualified to talk about this in depth but i imagine that things were considerably more difficult for developing nations in this regard for instance i know that internet access used to be much more limited back then than it is now so imagine you're in a developing nation and you're trying to set up a simple school computer lab you just want your students to be able to type up book reports and that sort of thing you don't have internet access you have limited access to anything that could take advantage of the full capabilities of these modern powerhouse computers but they're all you can buy now you're gonna be looking at that and going why are we gonna spend our entire budget for the year trying to get five or six machines that students can share when just one of them has more power than all of them together can actually use in short there was a significant gap and nowadays it's been filled by computers simply getting incredibly cheap you can get a modern laptop for under 300 and you can get a refurbed machine with a warranty for under a hundred and i mean if you're really working with a limited budget i'm sure you can go through some vendor that will load you down with aliexpress sludge for under 50 bucks a machine and hey if it breaks you can afford to buy another one that all took a long time to happen however so this gap existed for quite some time in the mid-2000s there were probably plenty of organizations feeling the bern who would have really loved a simpler cheaper alternative to quote doing it right so circa 2003 enter end computing a company that wanted to close this gap with a simple inexpensive solution a few years later around 2006 or so they released that solution the end computing x 300. all right so the box starts right out with a huge claim it says computing for the next billion people so they're going straight for the gold right then it says that it's been deployed in over 80 countries now if i'm right if this thing first hit the market no 6 and this box design is from 07 then either end computing is blowing a little smoke or they moved really fast in other words maybe it really did fill the gap but how could whatever's in this little box do that well it's easy right here on the front it tells you it will liberate the power of your pc with multi-user computing up to seven users on one pc now that's bold i'm sure a lot of us have had this thought before uh you know you could put multiple graphics cards in a pc right so why can't you assign one desktop environment to each card you know you can have a desktop on both monitors so why can't you also have a unique mouse and keyboard on each monitor that way if you're broke and your little brother wants to use the computer you can just put another monitor down turn it around and he can use it well you use yours it should be that simple but you can't do it you know microsoft didn't write it so it's not doable it's usually the way it goes with windows so end computing is promising the seemingly impossible here so what could be inside this little box to change that there's a lot of stuff here this uh by the way it says uh is the three user access terminal kit but it's actually the seven user the fully kitted out version it just happens to fit in the same box for some reason by the way apparently the three user kit was 270 dollars so if we assume there's a small discount let's guess that the seven user setup was about 500 so keep that number in your mind as we go through all this stuff so there's a bunch of stuff in here the first component here is the pci card we'll go into this in greater depth later but uh it's just got two generic chips on it that don't tell you much about what it does and a ram chip and then on the end you've got three rj45s and to save you some time they're not ethernet to anyone who's used to looking at weird cards you'll immediately recognize that this is completely proprietary next we can open up one of these little white boxes and we find the x300 access terminal this is a real simple unit we've got a power light on the front there's no no switches no controls nothing except on the back you've got an rj45 vga ps2 keyboard and mouse and audio on the bottom there's a label it's got the model and the serial number and that's it so i've got six of these the other one doesn't have a box it's in this room somewhere and then i have two of these pci cards each one accepts three connections so that's a total of seven users because whatever this thing does it doesn't replace the built-in you know keyboard mouse and monitor on the station itself so six of these devices plus the local console on the machine that's seven users there's also a low profile bracket for a small form factor computer and then of course you know we've got the driver disks for some reason i ended up with three of them and three sets of instructions and of course the instructions are of that uh yeah that's how you know something's high quality right when it's got the fold out instructions by the way i of course ripped the driver disk and put it up on internet archive being a good steward so the back of the box says all you do is put the pci card into your computer and then you hook up all the access terminals and then over here it says that they all get simultaneous desktop operation they can all run their own applications and it says that all you need is a 1.3 gigahertz machine you know typical mid-range or low-end options of the time and it'll run on windows or linux and the only limitation it states is that it won't run 3d games or full screen home theater applications so there's the claims and that's really all we have claims there's no explanation on the box or the manual of how end computing intends to pull this off it seems like it's got to be some sort of dirty filthy trick i mean they got to be cheating right before we get too upset however let's see what it can do i just happen to have two monitors two keyboards two mice and the edge who if you're not familiar you can meet in my previous video all right so here's our test fixture i've got a monitor back here as well as a keyboard and mouse which are connected to the pc directly on servers by the way that's often called the local console so that's the terminology i'll use this display here is also mirroring the local console so you'll see what i'm seeing this monitor on the other hand as well as this keyboard and mouse are connected to the x300 terminal unit and into the card on the back of the machine so we're both sitting at the login screen but if you look closely they're not the same login screen the text here and here differs and if i log in two different wallpapers two different sets of icons on the desktop two different start menus these sure look like two different user accounts now this could be some kind of trickery right like maybe there's uh it's doing some sort of like virtual desktop thing or something like that it'd be pretty tough because you know we actually have our own mouse over here separate from this one and windows just doesn't have support for that but hey let's go deeper right let's start winamp over here and let's start vlc over there all right now both programs are running but if we go to task manager and take a look winamp is running as my user crd and vlc is running as x1 so these are definitely separate users and this isn't some sort of weird virtualization trick because if we look in my computer all the same user folders all the same drives and everything so so this is definitely two different sessions on the same machine same process space and everything it just works we're listening to music and we're watching ren and stimpy and it's just working somehow right i mean hell let's it's 2007. let's start crisis here we go all right we're playing crisis this is what you did in 2007. this machine can do everything that my 2007 pc could do just for some reason somebody can also be watching cartoons on at the same time which my 2007 pc couldn't do it's running crisis about as well as my pc in 2007 did also okay but seriously though let's test this uh kind of formally right this thing was intended for you know school slash officee kind of application so let's try some of that stuff okay there's word does word have like some default templates or something all right there we go we got two independent words open which of course isn't all that impressive since i mean you can already open multiple copies of word right here we can open powerpoint as well all right there we go we got some some powerpoint slideshows as well same situation okay it runs uh let's get something a little heavier here we go photoshop that should put a little strain on it right now you might be asking would an underfunded school be able to afford photoshop well yes if adobe's marketing people felt like exploiting the educational market that year or if they pirated it photoshop runs just fine on here you know it's kind of hard to demo two people working at once when i don't have two people though so i went ahead and put together a little benchmark script this guy here uh just makes a really big image and then does a big expensive rotary blur to it and let's see how long that takes right that's uh about 20 seconds let's see if we can hit both at once eh eh click hey 40 seconds how about that just about twice as long huh but you know here's a good place to make a point photoshop like most productivity tools is not continuous duty it's intermittent duty you do big things once in a while that chew up all the cpu power for usually a few seconds at a time and the rest of the time you're doing little operations like carefully deleting pixels that might go on for hours but use almost no cpu time this means that if two people are working on the same machine but they're not both hitting the radial blur button at the same time they could probably share the cpu pretty effectively and never really notice any slowdown so this idea has legs so far this is pretty impressive however it works it seems to be pulling it off these are pretty basic office applications though so what if we hit it a little bit harder let's find something that's a bit more of a challenge suppose your school doesn't have that much budget but hey they've got some camcorders and they want to do a filmmaking class can we do that on here this thing might be able to run multiple copies of powerpoint but video editing has got to be a bridge too far right well surprisingly no i can actually run two concurrent copies of adobe premiere pro 1.5 on here and they're way more usable than you'd think again it's kind of hard for me to simulate two people working at once but i can gin something up here so here i applied a ripple effect to the video on this one so it's having to calculate that effect uh 30 frames a second in real time right which should chew up a good chunk of cpu but over here on the other one i can do some edits delete part of the video just put in a transition and now we can play this back and our transition and the video effect happen in pretty much real time there aren't really any hitches or stutters even and anyone who's used a video editor before will probably be pretty impressed by this because they have a tendency to not be the most optimized pieces of software adobe premiere is kind of notorious for using way more power than it should for simple tasks now this is not a high resolution video it's a 720 by 480 rip of a vhs video tape so it's not exactly hd video by 2007 this was probably a little understated but still it's impressive that two people can do it at once and i imagine there's room to spare the fact it's not hitching or anything even though both of these are performing real-time video effects means you probably could go up in resolution i just forgot to try now i could run some other software at this point but what could i prove if this thing can run two copies of adobe premiere then what normal business application could i run that it would struggle with it's knocked this out of the park and that was supposed to be my killer so i don't really know what to do next i guess the logical next step has to be can you game on it it's not for that and the box outright says that it won't run 3d games or full screen home theater applications and presumably whatever limitation prevents those from working probably prevents full screen games from working well also but in 2007 not all games that we were playing were 3d accelerated and not all games were necessarily full screen so at least some should work on here and wouldn't you know it some of them do i had to restrict myself to older titles but that still left some good stuff so the first title i tried was doom 95 you know it's classic and it'll run on any version of windows from well 95 up theoretically trouble is for some reason it fails to switch video modes correctly so although it does seem to start and run well it looks like this and although it is actually running correctly like the game is running you can see the obviously the resolution's all wrong and the palette's all wrong so you know i don't even think your your little brother would be willing to play it like this so that's a bust unfortunately however by 2007 there were a number of mature doom source ports that considerably updated and cleaned up the code and in fact zdoom will run on here just fine so here for instance i've got two players in a local multiplayer game so you and your older brother could in fact play doom together although it is hard to play doom on two keyboards at once uh this actually does work perfectly it's not the fault of the game at all doom was pretty old at this point but we'll chalk this up as a win since it runs perfectly moving forward in time a little bit i tried quake which also works fairly well i couldn't find a working copy of the original windquake so again i got a source port this is called a mark v and it seems to work just fine multiplayer with this one however is a little janky so i can get into a multiplayer game and it seems to work at first but it has some weird lag artifacts going on that clearly make it unplayable as you can see when player two tries to move around they jerk and warp all over the place and they try to actually fight anything they just get murdered pretty easily so there's some sort of weird process or affinity bug going on that prevents this from working otherwise you know if whatever bug this is had been patched by this particular source port i'm sure this will be playable so there might be another source port out there that makes this work i just couldn't find one now it doesn't mean that you couldn't both play a single player game so again it's useful for letting your little brother share your machine but you know the fact you can't do multiplayer that's a pretty big bummer still gotta chalk this one up as a win just not a lan party win now i didn't try quake 2 since its code base is very similar to quake 1. i knew it wouldn't work and quake 3 actually requires a 3d accelerator it was one of the first games that ever did however unreal tournament which came out at the same time didn't i was astonished to find that it actually runs quick as hell in 800 by 600 window mode with the graphics on high i'm getting over 30 fps which is more than playable and there's no weird lag effects going on so again you could totally play ut against your brother for reasons unbeknownst the preferences menu only lets you go up to 800 by 600 but if you hack exe you can get it to run in 1024 which fills the entire screen even though it won't go full screen for some reason and you get about 25 fps which is again fairly playable although you can see the uh like weapon animations don't play at this resolution so really you gotta play the 800 by 600 in a window which is a bit of a bummer but not actually that unusual if you're playing on a budget so i'm going to chalk this up as a win as well what about something a little less action oriented okay well how about uh simcity 3000 this one's just about fine um it's a little sluggish loading building art for some reason like it just occasionally takes a bit to load all that in but otherwise it runs okay it's not a multiplayer game of course but you know again if you and your brother both want to play simcity then you could do it this is also something i can sort of imagine being on deck at a school computer lab anyway and of course it strongly suggests that edutainment titles like oregon trail that just have simple two-dimensional graphics would probably also run fine so everything's kind of coming up milhouse so far it's not the best offering i mean these are all pretty old games but i remember being broke and desperate if i could have had a lan party with a bunch of friends even if we had to play old games i would have gone for it so this is still pretty cool trouble is i'm cherry-picking here most of the stuff you really wanted to run out of land probably wouldn't have run for instance look what happens when i try to start starcraft it seems like this game would be a slam dunk you know it's old it's two-dimensional but it's a native windows game and it's a great lan party option even in 2007 but on the x300 it pops this cryptic error message about not being able to set the video mode now this is the third game we've seen with weird video problems whether it's rendering incorrectly or failing to recognize all available resolutions or failing to start at all there's some weird problem going on with video here what could be causing it well this is of course going to be another of my videos where i tell you that i can't say for sure how any of this works and what you're going to hear is going to be a mix of guesswork and extrapolation from the few hard facts i could pin down if anyone has any solid inside info i'd love to hear it but i scoured the internet torn apart the software as best i could and all i really have are tidbits there is one thing i am sure of this is not a virtualization trick doing this with vms at this time on this hardware in this part of the country localized entirely to your kitchen was not possible there were no virtualization specific features in the p4 as i recall and even if there were if you were running two or god forbid six xp vms on this machine it would have started glowing the cpu overhead would have been inconceivable not to mention seven os reading and swapping with a single pre-ssd spinning disk the whole thing would have run like a fleet of 386s for about 10 minutes before it melted straight through the floor virtualization is cool but in this era it was a hammer and this machine would have crumbled under its blow i may not know exactly how the end computing works but i am positive it's doing something considerably more nuanced and as usual i'm going to take you through the whole agonizing process of how i determined that as is traditional let's make a short story long probably not surprisingly none of this works out of the box you put the cards in your machine you get some exclamation points in device manager and that's it no picture after you install the drivers the terminal comes on but it just displays this waiting for startup message you have to go install the control software before it can do anything in order to install the software and activate the devices you have to enter the serial number from the bottom of each device which is a weird form of drm i can't figure it out why do you have to prove that you have the device when you couldn't use the device if you didn't have it it's weird with the software installed when the pc powers up the terminal now shows the login but let's take a look at the management software if we get into the management app from the systray here this is kind of cute it actually turns out to be a snap in for the microsoft management console this is a funny thing microsoft added mmc in like windows 2000 and i believe the idea is that if your program is meant to be deployed to like an enterprise network mmc has all these built-in features for like multi-computer management where you can just connect to another machine and anything that's in mmc you'll be able to control remotely so it makes sense if end computing was thinking needs to be deployed in sort of a fleet configuration that you might want to be able to manage them all from a central admin location but it's still really funny because there's very little software that i've seen that bothered to do this even where it made a lot of sense anyway under local settings here you can see all the stations i've configured i only have one right now but you can get in here and you can stop it so you can shut it down completely if you don't want somebody to use it or you can send a message to the user on that station you can also descend down into the station and see the details about it so for instance what user is logged in if i log in here bam there we go x1 is in there now we can also go to the application loaded and this will show us every process that's running under that user under station settings you can give them names you can have it not turn the station on when the machine starts so somebody has to ask permission basically before they can use a station you can enable auto log on so they all come up directly into a particular user you can even have it limit the programs they can run to just one application this is something that's built into windows these are just convenient shortcuts for it but they make a lot of sense right because you might have sort of a kiosk set up like a library computer for small kids where they can come in they sit down at the machine and it's just always running the same program information settings has a bunch of information and it also has these system settings but we'll come back to those in a moment usb device assignments this is interesting so if you think about it the host's machine here has a number of usb ports on it so when you plug something in who should that device appear for because if it appears for everyone that could be a problem for instance i just plugged in a usb drive and if we wait a moment there's the auto run and you can see the auto run is on there as well so both of these users can see that device they can both interact with it and you might not want that suppose you're on a machine where a bunch of students are taking a test and the teacher has plugged in a usb drive that contains the test information including the answers if everyone can read the drive well you know how kids are anything you leave out they're going to find so there's a solution to this you can go down here to available usb ports and then dig down to the particular device that you want here we go mass storage device and then you can say that you want this device to only appear on the main console and now it won't show up on any of the stations it seems you can do this with any kind of usb device so you could get really granular with this you know you could do something like you could set up three teams of two people on one machine and then give each team access to a usb drive that they're storing their project information on or if you did have multiple people editing video on one machine maybe you have video capture cards that are specific to each workstation keyboards and mice work a little differently so they get broken out into their own section you can come in here and go to user detection so basically if you've got you know six keyboards and six mice you wanna figure out which one goes with which station you can use this to you know you move the keyboard move the mouse and it figures out which one it is and you can assign it to a station that way you can also select a keyboard and go in and tell it to blink all the lights on it so you can identify it when you've got a whole mess of them plugged in they also have a separate section for audio devices so if you're say running a bunch of audio workstations you've got a bunch of dacs hooked up you can assign those to individual workstations as well so this is a pretty rich feature set i could see how this could have been a lot more limited and disappointing but they've actually provided for an enormous number of interesting use cases you could do just about anything you'd want to do with this system but let's go back to the system settings because i want to show you something there there's a bunch of global options here they're largely self-explanatory nothing really interesting except for one x 300 card video mode settings see if you go into the display properties on the x300 here it only lists one available resolution and one available color depth you have to change them from this menu here which contains two options 1024x768 at 60hz or 800x600 at 75hz let me be crystal here these devices support those two modes and nothing else which is very strange graphics cards aren't normally like that but this one can't run it 800 by 632-bit color or 1024x768 at 256 colors and it can't switch modes on the fly and it can't run at 640 by 480. this is a bizarre limitation every graphics card since 1987 could support 640x480 it was universal after ibm put out the first ps2 this is the only thing i've ever seen that can't do it and this is why starcraft wouldn't launch because that game just assumes that your card could do 640x480 so all the art in the game is designed for that resolution and it won't run in a window it'll only run full screen and that res and color depth and it's not alone 640x480 8-bit color was a pretty common requirement for a lot of titles including a lot of edutainment titles if you go back to a lot of that old uh you know full motion video quicktime stuff the sort of castle explorer and things like that um it tries to launch in 640 by 480 256 colors well that's always going to fail on this device so end computing really sort of shot themselves in the foot here by not solving whatever problem causes this this limitation was wacky in 2007 but i think it'll make a little more sense once we take a look at the hardware so once again here's the x300 card a mystery by any measure we can sort of pick it apart but not much first off we've got a big old chip with a sticker on it now here's a tip for you if you're looking at a piece of hardware you don't know anything about it's got a big chip with a sticker on it it's almost certainly an fpga this is a thing companies do that big sticker is them trying to brand a generic component because fpgas are a type of chip that has no inherent function you can program them to be anything you want billions and billions of possibilities that means there's no way for me to find out what this chip actually does i can look up the part number on it but that's just going to tell me that it's an fpga i don't know how people reverse engineer these if you can like slurp the code out of them or what but with my limited capabilities i have no idea what this thing does inside fortunately it betrays some of its functionality through the operating system when you first install this and boot up you see a device show up in device manager called a bridge this is a pci bridge something that plugs into a pci slot and splits it out like a hub to let you plug in more devices they're almost always part of a card that has multiple functions on it and indeed when you install the driver for the bridge it disappears and three video adapters appear in its place after you install the drivers for those they show up as ordinary displays see if i go into display properties i've got an eight head machine now this is actually an advertised feature and computing has a video on youtube where they explain that if you don't install the additional end computing software that makes these do all their magic you can just use them for additional desktops you can put two of these in a machine which gives you six 1024x768 displays for under 600 which is actually pretty cool so i think it's safe to say that one of the things this fpga is doing is acting as a low end triple head graphics card which explains quite a few things the graphics aren't being rendered entirely in software nor by my radeon 9550 they're being rendered by whatever gpu core they could fit three of into one low end fpga which probably wasn't much especially in 2007 i'm also guessing this is why it can't switch resolutions on the fly they probably used some very bare bones fpga gpu cores that they got pre-made from somebody that didn't have all the sophistication of a real graphics card they were probably intended for embedded applications or something so instead of having all of the capabilities you expect like changing resolutions and auto detecting the monitor and stuff like that it just has two hard-coded paths in the code that powers the fpga and they're probably just sending it one command to switch between the two this is also certainly why there's no 3d capabilities you could probably make a 3d accelerator in an fpga nowadays but in 2007 no way in addition to the three video devices it also installed three sound devices that i didn't have to pick drivers for i'm guessing that's because they're based on the ac97 standard which windows probably had a generic driver for there's oddly no interfaces that i can see for the additional keyboards and mice on the interface boxes so that's kind of spooky i'm not sure how they did that so that's all we get from the card i think we know what the fpga does i'm sure the ram chip is just for video ram and this guy here turns out to be a thing called a cpld a complex programmable logic device it's sort of like an older less sophisticated brother to the fpga i think they do a lot less i don't know what that one does for sure either but i looked at the data sheet and it says that it makes a good pci interface so i'm guessing that's what's acting as the pci bridge so those are all the answers we can get from the card let's take a look at the terminal adapter so the insides of this thing don't explain much either but they do rule out a lot since there's really not much in here there's another cpld and very little else some power supply components and some passives and that's it so right away i'm sure this isn't any kind of thin client i don't believe cplds are sophisticated enough to host that sort of thing but more importantly it doesn't have any kind of internal state if i unplug the cable while this is running it shuts off but when i plug it back in it picks right back up where it was it doesn't have to reconnect and renegotiate a session in addition if i just move the cable to another port on the card it picks up a different session i also found that if you don't have a ps2 mouse connected when you start the machine up you can't just unplug this thing in order to connect one it still won't work until you restart the machine so that suggests that the ps2 mouse controller is actually back in the card which is where i think all the intelligence is i'm pretty sure that the card hosts everything and this device is just a fancy breakout box but that raises a different question if all the intelligence is in the card then how do all those signals get to the box because there aren't enough pins in a cat5 cable there's only eight and there's quite a few more signals than that here vga alone needs five signals a red green blue and then horizontal and vertical sync then you need i don't remember i think it's two to four pins each for the ps2 ports and then at least two pins for the audio port and that all adds up to like 11 pins so something here is doing double duty but that cpld i don't think is complex enough to generate a video signal on its own i don't see the parts i would expect for that fortunately that part is easy to explain the video signals are actually being sent over the cat5 cable raw if you trace all the pins in the rj45 connector you'll discover that three of them go through a couple resistors and then straight over to the vga port so that's why the cable length for the manual can't be any longer than about 15 feet because if you're just shooting analog vga over an unshielded cable you can't run it very far i found two other pins were carrying plus five volts and ground which leaves three and while i'm not that great with an oscilloscope so i couldn't check this i suspect that two of them are carrying the horizontal and vertical sync pulses for the vga port i just couldn't find them on the board and the remaining one carries the ps2 keyboard and mouse and the audio signals in a serial digital format which the cpld is unpacking i suspect that some of these resistors that you see next to the cpld are being used as a sort of a ladder dac to reproduce the audio probably looks terrible on distortion meter but you know it's good enough for desktop boops and bonks so in other words if end computing had been willing to spring for custom cables with like 11 or 13 wires this thing might not have contained any active electronics at all would just be a breakout box so at this point i don't think the hardware is providing any of the magic here at first i assume that at least the card itself had to have some kind of secret sauce in it but at this point i don't think so i think this is just a triple head graphics card triple head sound card and so on i think it's a completely generic piece of hardware that just has a lot of them in one trench coat and all the magic is happening in software as far as the software goes things are pretty scant end computing wasn't talking about how it worked back in the day i can't find any white papers or documentation really nothing that alludes to how this functions under the hood i haven't found any websites that talk about how it works and the only real hints i've gotten have been from friends who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty because they can't remember where they got that info however armed with the preconceptions they gave me i think i've been able to nail this down it all begins with windows terminal services that's the component of windows that allows multiple users like multiple thin clients or remote desktop sessions to connect to one windows server and have independent desktop environments many of you have probably used this if you've ever used remote desktop for your job that's the same thing in fact the name of the file is mstsc.exe which stands for microsoft terminal services client now terminal services has never been shipped in a consumer version of windows at least not in its full fat form prior to windows xp it was actually impossible on any non-server version of windows to have multiple user sessions going at once you couldn't detach your current session that is leave all your programs running and allow someone else to use your computer and then return to your session later there just weren't any components for that but when microsoft merged their product lines when they made windows xp the first consumer version of windows nt they realized that the terminal services server was now available in the consumer code base and that there was something consumery they could do with that they still didn't want more than one person using a copy of windows at any given time but they realized that a lot of families were sharing machines and that was really inconvenient so they added a feature called fast user switching which is what allows you to log out of one account leaving all your stuff running so that someone else in your family can log into the same machine do whatever they need to do and then you can go back to your stuff later this was very rudimentary multi-user computing but it was implemented by bringing the entire terminal services code base into consumer windows that means that suddenly xp had things like the graphics remoting system which is what allows windows to redirect the video from a desktop session as well as all the input for that session and shove it down a network pipe interesting thing about that is that it supports multiple different types of clients you can have software like the remote desktop client hardware like a thin client or an internal module in windows like fast user switching that i believe is how this all comes together my guess is that the end computing software acts as a terminal services client it connects back to the machine it's running on and starts multiple terminal services sessions but instead of connecting those over the network it turns around and patches them into the x300 hardware driver so the video and input goes to the card i found evidence of this in a few places the manual does use the phrase terminal services in a few places although that's kind of generic and it's not capitalized so that's not really conclusive however in the configuration utility there's a check box that says use wts api 32 which is the windows terminal services api and when i look at the strings in the executables and dlls that make up the end computing software i find references to the terminal services registry entries and apis so i'm pretty sure my hypothesis is correct especially because i can't see how else they could have done this so in other words it is a thin client solution it's just even thinner than usual a normal thin client contains basically all the components of a normal pc that's power supply cpu ram and then all the peripherals video audio and so on this approach saves a lot of money by cutting out about half of those you only need the peripherals the power supply and ram and cpu are provided by the host machine you're already on so they solved the thin client problem by making an even thinner client it's very tidy i suppose except they shouldn't be possible xp is not a server os so it doesn't contain terminal services yes i know i said it has the code but it's a well-known fact that consumer windows contains like 85 of the features that are in the server versions of windows they're just all turned off microsoft could have released a 10 kilobyte patch to let windows xp act as a terminal server and they didn't because they want money as proof of this if you buy any professional version of windows xp pro 7 pro 10 pro it has a slightly less restricted terminal services server you can connect to any modern pro version of windows with the remote desktop client however it'll kick out your local desktop session when you do this microsoft relaxed a little bit to let you connect to these os's remotely but they still won't let you put two people on one computer at once microsoft wants to get paid for every single pair of hands that is using windows at any given moment not only does microsoft make you buy the more expensive windows server but you can't just hook 50 users up to it you have to buy client access licenses which are pretty expensive in other words while the components of terminal services are in windows xp you are not allowed to use them and that means the end computing did a big bad looking at the original xp license it says you may install one copy of the product on a single computer except as otherwise permitted below you may not permit any device to use access display or run other executable software nor run the product or product's user interface unless the device has a separate license for the product this and other verbage basically means that you can run programs on your pc but you can't let anybody else run them on your pc at the same time this does suggest it might be legal to connect a bunch of clients to xp if you purchased them with licenses even if they weren't running the os themselves but i imagine this is probably disallowed elsewhere in the eula and besides that end computing probably had to modify parts of windows that deal with licensing which was very likely a violation in itself i'm not a lawyer i don't know if that's really what this means but the important thing is that their intent is clear that's why it's remarkable to me that despite my conviction that end computing defied microsoft violated their license and delivered a product that hacked their os to cheat them out of hundreds or thousands of extra licenses they didn't seem to get caught doing it maybe they thought they could work within the law here because technically this isn't really a separate device right because it's inside your computer and that makes it all one device right i'm absolutely positive that if they'd gotten sued microsoft lawyers would have just pointed at these two things and the judge would have banged his gavel and it would have been over they would have lost because microsoft wanted them to lose and that's all that matters if you are not a fortune 500 and a business decides that you can't do what you're doing you lose deleting your nintendo roms after 24 hours or owning actual cartridges doesn't make you any less guilty of software piracy because nintendo says you are this is always how it's been so end computing had no power here except that microsoft chose not to destroy them and i have no idea why i couldn't find any articles about them getting sued and the product stayed on the market for a really long time before being replaced with similar variations and this entire time they showed some consciousness of guilt i mean if you poke around on their website in 2009 they actually had a disclaimer up there that said that you did have to have multiple copies of the windows license which of course is totally bogus but it was clear that they they knew that this was actually a violation and they were trying to cover their asses see that the xp license actually says uh windows client operating system does not permit licensing a multi-user solution right so that didn't work it wasn't valid but it doesn't matter right because it's just cya they're just covering their asses if end computing can plausibly say well it's the user's problem to not use it in an illegal way and the users are too small individually to get noticed by microsoft then everyone wins right and if it's not clear i'm completely behind them on this if you're in a country or a school district that's completely broke because all your money is being sapped away by capitalist then yeah buddy steal all you could carry i salute and computing as heroes of the revolution on the other hand uh however wouldn't true heroes of the revolution have supported linux as well i mean they say they do the box says they do the manual says they do their website says they do but there's no software on the disk for linux the manual doesn't have any instructions for linux it all just says windows and even if they did make linux software given that this thing apparently has some form of drm since it asks you for the serial numbers on the device and then tries to phone home with them for some reason i would guess that they never would have made an actual open source version of it because then people could defeat that drm uh so whatever they did make would probably have been a binary blob compiled for like a couple ancient crusty versions of a couple ancient crusty distributions and from what little info i found on ancient forum posts and whatnot that does seem to be the case it looks like they never really delivered on this and the odd thing about that is it doesn't seem like it would have required that much effort i mean linux already has this baked in going all the way back to the unix days multi-user remote desktop as we would think of it now was always there the only thing end computing had to do was write some x modules to support this device and to add you know user management stuff so you could make decisions about where to assign usb devices and things like that this wasn't a big lift and the only reason i can think that they didn't do it is because they were a janky fly-by-night company that made promises they later realized were inconvenient to keep and hey who can blame them for being a little janky they made a product that makes remote desktop connections to itself it's cutting out a middleman that there were probably good reasons not to cut out uh it's also using computer hardware for purposes it wasn't intended for and it's several types of illegals so we can't get too upset at it no let's focus on what matters doesn't matter if it's legal or legit or make sense the question is does it do what it says it can do if you actually tried to run a computer lab off of this thing could it do it well to figure that out we're gonna need six of them i've got six full terminals here including six keyboards and six mice up there that are really hard to get to and i've put them all through their paces and i've just been astonished at the results in fact the results are so impressive that i have to sort of disclaimerize them before we continue i spent like two days going through all the tests for this thing and i wrote a script where i said that you can run productivity applications on all six terminals at once they're not fooling it really does work but you know they bog down fairly easily so you really have to keep it life you fly too close to the sun you get burned any attempt to really tax the machine with a heavy photoshop workload or god forbid a video game would bring it to its knees instantly but of course that made sense because this wasn't made for that right so it all made sense at first and then as i kept working on it i started to get suspicious because it really seemed like it was tapping out too early i'm running this all off of my pc that i call the edge and when i got that system it wasn't super hot was a pentium 4 2.53 gigahertz with a 533 front side bus a really old motherboard that took two different types of ram uh and no hyper threading so not really a hot system at all but that was kind of on purpose i wanted to use something that represented sort of a bargain basement or even just a machine you had sitting around in 2007 because you know you're trying to put together a computer lab and you're just using whatever you have and the only investment you're making in new parts is the end computing cards themselves and i figured this machine with its limited front side bus and not nearly top of the line cpu frequency was a perfect candidate so i figured things would be slow but i expected that and i wanted to illustrate that you could take even a lower end machine and turn it into something sluggish but workable better than nothing but it just seemed too slow it was taking five solid minutes for all users to log in and even with a single spinning hard disk and whatnot that seemed too slow to me i was running powerpoint presentations on all six displays at once and when i would hit the button to advance they would actually take like a second or two and animations were jerky and slowed down and whatnot photoshop sort of did okay but like it was really dragging on simple operations and if i launched adobe premiere on two terminals at once it would actually hang the machine after a couple days of this i was just sick of it i thought you know maybe the cpu isn't fast enough maybe you just couldn't do this and what fun is a video like that or maybe the motherboard was damaged maybe it had dead cap syndrome and i just couldn't see it because the caps hadn't actually popped yet so i roll over to the rear pc and i dug up a new motherboard and cpu okay not new by any measure and i upgraded the machine to a p4 3.2 with hyper threading and in the process of doing so i discovered that one of the latches on the heatsink had been broken so the machine had probably been thermal throttling this whole time because it had no effect of heat sinking unfortunately by the time i discovered this i'd already finished the rebuild so it was a bit of a bummer because i wanted to do this on a lower end machine but i checked and the 3-2 chip came out in 2003 it looks like so it's not that new it was four years old when this box came out so maybe it was on the used market for a reasonable price at that point and either way it's just a little more fun to see what this thing can do if you did have a higher end system and from these results you can sort of extrapolate what you could do if you had an actual top of the line system from that era what could that get you versus buying six separate high-end machines so first things first logging in on all six stations at once takes under two minutes uh and given that it's loading the nt profile for six users off of the same spinning disk that's actually kind of impressive ssds weren't really a thing yet so this is representative the office apps launch instantaneously and run just fine i don't think that's too terribly shocking running six copies of powerpoint it's actually not that abnormal but i was able to put the same slideshow up on all six screens and advanced to it as quickly as i could hit the spacebar and of course to test that i had to kneel on the floor trying to stay out of shot while madly playing whack-a-mole with six different keyboards trying to figure out how my life ended up here photoshop does take a couple minutes to launch if you fired up on all sessions at once but once it settles down it runs pretty zip quick as if only one user were on the machine i did try running that benchmark script from earlier and it completes in about two and a half minutes which is about six times slower than the single user performance who saw that one coming also if you recall i mentioned these boxes have audio jacks on them and sure enough there's independent audio for each desktop so if your task requires sound that does work [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so these basic tests haven't really told us anything we didn't already know especially since you can already run multiple copies of photoshop or powerpoint on your machine already a lot of us probably have so i wasn't expecting any surprises from this next test and as a result the outcome obliterated me i launched adobe premiere on all six terminals at once and prepared for the computer to evaporate into a mist instead it ran with a quickness that i still cannot fully wrap my head around like i said earlier video editing is a heavy task and premiere is not the lightest way to go about it but somehow it actually works and works well again i can't simulate six people working on the same machine realistically since i only have two hands and thanks to the accident the one brain but i devised some experiments for instance i can start a render on one session which should by all rights hang all the others because it sucks up as much cpu power and memory as it possibly can but then i can go to the other sessions and i can scrub around the timeline and place edits and it actually works i wouldn't have expected that at all so i stopped the render and i tried hitting play on all six timelines at once thinking that there was no way they would be able to keep up because they have to stream the video data off the hard drive in six separate streams simultaneously that should completely smash the i o performance of the machine and yeah it does but not as bad as i expected they don't play it anywhere close to real time but they do play and in fact in reality you'd never have six people hitting play at the same moment except once in a long while in reality you'd have some people editing and some people playing at any given moment and in fact if i stop three of the players the other three actually pick up to nearly real time i don't think it's quite 30fps but it's close it's more than usable i can have two sessions playing and the third one i can go through place edits put in some transitions and i can preview those and it all actually works fairly smoothly which means you could actually do this you could put six people on here and with a normal like stochastic distribution of effort where people are doing different tasks at different times nobody's hitting the same button simultaneously on all six systems i think it would actually work and that's stunning especially given that this is not an optimized setup even without spending much more money you could still make huge improvements on this because again it's streaming all that video data off of just one hard drive if you put just one more hard drive in there it would spread out the i o load so much that i think you'd get a lot better performance so while i doubt end computing expected this sort of application it works much better than anyone could have anticipated and the funny thing about this is it would save you a lot of money not just in hardware but in software as well if you were a little sketchy because see i didn't activate seven copies of adobe premiere every time you install it it asks you to activate with adobe it phones home and make sure that nobody else has used this license well after i activated it on one session all the others just worked so if you're a school that's really hurting for money you could divide one adobe license among seven students without having to delve into the world of actual software piracy and hunt down a crack that may not be something end computing wanted to encourage and it may not be advisable legally for an institution but hey sometimes practicality reigns i would guess this did happen if for no other reason then there's no way to actually do it correctly if you try and install another copy of premiere it just says it's already installed so if anybody did use adobe products in this sort of configuration it was impossible for them to follow the license terms to the letter and in my opinion more power to them so the productivity software pretty much runs circles around itself and i think this device has proven all its points but before we talk about the implications of that we got to go back to the video games question is this a lan party in a box well maybe probably not though two players is sort of okay but after that it gets progressively worse for instance here's seven space marines in one z doom trench coat and while they are all connected and they can interact with each other the frame rate is atrocious it's like less than 10. i tried doing everything i could to fix this i lowered the internal rendering resolution i shrank the viewport and there was no improvement so while doom is fairly forgiving it's got this sort of play slow but looks fast design methodology that makes it more playable than you'd expect at this frame rate we gotta chalk this one up as a failure quake suffers quite a bit more and in stranger ways you can run two sessions sort of janky but if you try to run more they actually won't launch and i don't know why anything after the first two sessions will just sit there running in task manager but not going anywhere and it bogs the system down super bad so the games that are running have a really really high apparent ping and then if i close one of the running sessions another one will open up and if i close that one another one will open up and so on so some sort of weird flocking thing going on here that i don't understand so this one is a complete failure maybe another source port would work better but i couldn't find one but this seems to be a problem with quake specifically because unreal tournament ran really impressively like a lot better than i would have expected i mean it's not amazing but if you've got two or three players in a match and you're running 640 by 480 windows you can actually get 30 fps in all three sessions at times it's not consistent but it's a lot better you'd expect it's not great but it is playable and you could probably add a fourth player if you had the host playing on a 3d accelerator i didn't try that now if you increase the resolution it gets bad fast at 10 24 three players will be running it like less than 10 fps if you want to have all six players you're gonna have to drop to 640 by 480 and turn down the graphics settings if you want to get anything faster than like 8fps and even so it's not a whole lot of fun a funny thing about this though is when i'm doing this one of the sessions will always have twice the fps of all the others so like one will be at 30 while all the others are at 15. my guess is that whichever session i start first gets assigned to one of the pentium 4's sort of virtual cores and then all the following ones get assigned to the other one by the hyper-threading scheduler i don't know if that's really how the p4 works but it's the only thing i can think of so ut is not quite a lan party option with only three players and low graphics settings it might be okay at this point i was thinking you know these games may be old but they were all cutting edge when they came out what if i found something that was intended to be lower spec so i dredged up a copy of fury 3 which is a really old 3d sort of combat flight simulator thing it's a spiritual successor to terminal velocity a dos game but it came out for windows in about 1995 and i believe it was written with the very old pre-directx win g api so it'll actually run on windows 3.1 i'm told and surprise surprise i can run six copies on here and they all run playably it's not a multiplayer game but it suggests that there might be other 3d titles out there not so mainstream that would actually work in this configuration so with the 3d games aside i went back and tried simcity 3000 thinking that would run like a dream and surprisingly it actually doesn't after two or three players the machine starts to bog down super bad at six players it's completely unplayable now i suspect this isn't a graphics thing so much as it's just the simulation being very computationally intense i was thinking simcity 2000 might work better but that one refuses to run on multiple sessions at once for some reason that said there are lots of other games that probably would anything that's two-dimensional or runs in a window is probably a candidate and would run just fine and that happens to include virtually all edutainment software so again a school could load this up with oregon trail and everyone would have a great time these are remarkable results the pentium 4 is not thought of as a powerhouse by modern standards but i feel i've demonstrated that even now it would be adequate for a lot of computer lab tasks up until you hit it with things that didn't exist back then like hd video or modern video games i think it would actually kick ass and hell maybe i'm wrong maybe this would eat hd video if it were in a sufficiently powerful machine in 2007 you could get a core 2 duo or a quad or hey maybe you could scrounge up a xeon on the used market and maybe that would eat multiple hd video sessions at once if you're interested in finding out let me know maybe i'll track down a machine we'll do this again but as fun as it is to think about the high end what i think is remarkable is that this machine is still massively overpowered for what i'm doing with it for those basic productivity tasks you could actually do this on a pentium 3. i tested on my dell 800 megahertz and it actually could run multiple concurrent sessions of most of this software it couldn't do premiere and it struggles with photoshop but again it would fall over the moment you pointed it at the internet but if you're not doing that you're not doing hd video etc a pentium 3 could actually survive in a modern computer lab if a p3 800 can serve the purposes of multiple office workers at once then we've been throwing money into a pit for decades when you walked into a computer lab in 2004 and were surrounded by pentium fours that was like standing in a room full of freighter engines being used to sharpen pencils the waste was absurd most computer labs could be served well by a couple mid-range machines or like one or two high-end machines if only the software would let you do what is obviously possible i'm sure they didn't intend it but end computing was doing something righteous by blowing past microsoft's arbitrary restrictions and allowing organizations to use the full capabilities of their massively overpowered systems when they had previously been forced to spend fortunes they didn't have on machines they didn't need one of the dangling questions is why this didn't become more common i've already talked to a few people who have seen them in use before but i've never seen one every computer lab i've ever seen was fully decked out with individual workstations this seems like a solid solution why didn't it show up basically everywhere i have no idea and i also think it could have gone further than schools i think end computing left a lot of money on the table by not trying to sell this to families imagine if you could buy a dual or triple head setup so that two kids in the family could have their own pc without actually having their own pc it would have sold like hotcakes of course they might have been just too busy with success because they went on to make more and different models after this there was the x350 which seems to be the same thing just with a newer card design then there was the x 550 which could do five users per card for a total of 11 users per machine later they switched away from direct attached devices and started selling the l series which is a more conventional network attached device so it's more like a thin client but i think they were still selling the hacked terminal services software and nowadays they're actually still around selling thin clients based on raspberry pi's that connect back to a virtualization system on your pc one of my favorite parts of this timeline is that in the middle of it they produced a product that tops the charts in terms of a baffling thing to find at the thrift store they partnered with lg specifically lg india to produce a monitor that embedded one of their thin clients so this was like the thinnest of clients you could buy this monitor that had an rj45 on the back and then plug it into a card on your pc and you'd have like six or ten people clustered around this machine with just monitors with keyboards and mice going into them the fact that they actually got a major corporation to partner with them for this is astonishing to me and you know it's not even like they didn't have competition this was actually kind of a bustling little industry i just picked this product because i had it there was a company called twinsoft i believe from singapore that produced a product called b-twin uh and there was another one from russia called astor that have similar claims but as i understand it they don't require the custom hardware they'll work with any graphics card and any keyboard mouse etc in your machine so that's pretty cool there's also a company called miniframe that made something called soft expand that seems to be very similar as well except i found an article about this one that says that yes they were hacking terminal services and it came to the conclusion that it was legal although i don't know how they did that it doesn't say in the article there was another company called user full that delivered something similar for linux again that seems like a really light lift you'd think it would be common but i can't find any info on how it worked and i can't find a copy of the software if anybody has one who knows where to get it let me know i'd love to try it out the most intriguing product in this space however was actually from microsoft windows multi-point server was a version of windows server that did this same thing i guess microsoft just kind of hacked out their own limitations this came out in i think 2008 or so and i'm guessing microsoft just realized the reality of the situation that not everyone could afford their very expensive operating system and they'd rather collect some license fees than none so this offered a native fully legitimate way to connect up to 20 terminals to one machine again using commodity hardware graphics cards keyboards myc provided yourself i don't know much about multipoint's performance or features but i'm guessing it's considerably slicker than the other ones since hey microsoft has full control of the os right in fact a friend of mine who's used it says that you can actually use it in split screen mode with two desktops sharing one monitor that sounds so cool that i just went to ebay and bought a copy so i'll have a video about that eventually multipoint persisted for a few years it eventually got rolled into windows server as a feature and then it disappeared after server 2016 i believe probably because microsoft realized that computers had gotten so cheap that this wasn't really necessary anymore still i'm really interested in seeing how it performed and if you are too uh if you'd like to see more about this let me know in the comments and in fact b-twin and aster both appear to still be for sale so maybe i'll pick those up at some point do a big comparison between multi-point server and the other offerings it competed with who knows but for now that's all i've got if you're new to the channel and you enjoyed this maybe you thought wow this guy is really trying too hard i like that please subscribe for more remember to turn on notifications youtube is just like that if you really enjoyed this consider supporting me on patreon at the link below much like all these folks appearing on your screen now we're appearing on these screens now this was a really hard video to make i had to put in a lot of effort to figure out how i was going to do it i had to source all this equipment figure out how to actually get it all on screen at once and design demonstrations that would try and show how it would work when i don't have six other people to assist me and i feel like i still miss the mark a little bit but i just want to take a moment and thank all the people who made it possible at all because this is my first video in my new studio and this rig literally would not have fit in my old one know which way or how it was simply not possible so if i tried to do this video back there it would have been sorely disappointing for everyone me in particular for all the people supporting me from those sending me a dollar a month to one sending more than i like to think about i have no idea how to thank you effectively but i will make you proud to everyone else thanks for watching you

Channel: Cathode Ray Dude

Views: 274,213

Keywords: technology, retroelectronics

Id: v8tjA8VyfvU

Length: 70min 13sec (4213 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 19 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ttkciar]

All the old-timey UNIX users are blinking at this wondering why the fuss .. "stat labs" have been doing this since the 1980s.

[u/RichardG867]

The concept did live on for a while as "zero clients". Windows MultiPoint Server (which he also mentioned) had support for zero clients, for instance. The biggest limitation with all solutions of this kind (including MultiPoint) is that the users are interacting with a local RDP connection instead of a real console, and that takes its toll on multimedia and games.

Tangent: there were other solutions out there to bypass the Terminal Services licensing limitations on Pro editions of Windows. Before plain termsrv.dll patches existed, I recall using a product called "XP Unlimited" to run two sessions (one local and one RDP) on my home system.

[u/Put_It_All_On_Blck]

I still think Microsoft could hit a home run by selling an Xbox that is basically a local server for gaming, windows, etc. And then zero client boxes for each TV and monitor. Because the modern setup of having multiple PCs in a family home, a gaming console, smart TV boxes, etc doesn't really make sense as most of the time hardware will go unused and an Xbox's hardware (or a future version) is more than capable of virtualizing a few desktops or streaming videos. Probably add a small subscription fee to do it for reoccurring profit.

[u/akarypid]

What would be the recommended setup for a shared Linux installation along these lines?

Curretnly I use virtual machines on a powerful desktop with a Ryzen 8c/16t and 64gb of RAM (I use the consoel and two family members use RDP via mRemoteNG to connect to their VM s from very old laptops in their rooms).

I am also toying around with xrdp.

I am curious though: is there a better alternative in software? In fact, is there a hardware solution like this one?