Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature

The big problem was that even serial terminals were ridiculously overpriced, more expensive than just buying a cheap PC and running a terminal emulator. And actual X terminals were insanely expensive.

You can sort of argue that these weren't 'multihead', because the video signal was generated by the terminal, but I don't think that's a good way to define it. All the processing still happened on the host. Serial terminals were mostly pretty stupid, with the exception of some, um, I think it was Tektronix models that had bit-addressable graphics. There was a fair bit more to an X terminal, as it was actually running the X server locally, but it was still really 'multihead' in most senses. The terminal wouldn't do anything by itself, it was just a smart display device for its attached machine.

It looks like Poettering's solution isn't really 'true' multihead either. It's still the same basic idea, but running over USB instead. And I gather it doesn't yet support regular text gettys, so it's not even a full replacement for oldschool serial terminals.

It wouldn't even be necessary, except for the loss of network transparency in GNOME and KDE. All you'd need, if the desktops still worked properly over a network, would be a Raspberry Pi at each terminal to run the screen and keyboard, and you'd be 'multihead' as much as any Unix machine ever was, back in the old days, and certainly as much as running this solution.