Along these lines, it would be neat to use Raspberry Pi or something to make a "terminal to HDMI adapter", allowing me to have an unlimited number (tens or even hundreds) of external monitors for my laptop, each running a separate terminal-mode program such as a text editor, htop, Bloomberg, etc.
I often find fully working LCD monitors discarded by people who have no use for them, and could easily collect five or more of them that way if I had a convenient way to "wire them up" to my laptop.
If you have enough USB ports, you should be able to get away with using DisplayLink dongles for the video part. DisplayLink doesn't require any additional video processing hardware (unlike DisplayPort) or even USB-C ports, you can run the old DisplayLink standard over plain old USB 2! Not great for playing video, but a terminal app should run just fine.
I think the current driver restricts you to 4 displays but I'm not entirely sure why (you can do 6 on Windows so I think it must be a driver issue).
Of course, with your RPi idea, you could connect one computer to dozens or maybe hundreds of serial ports, but if all you want is five more screens, USB should do fine for your needs.
It would seem what apps needed the most back then was more RAM and compute and it's still true today, we've just offload ed most of the compute and RAM requirements to GPUs now NVLink/NVswitch/Infiband is what Starlink was back then for $5000 DGX sparks and similar systems only
This is a great reminder that many of today's "breakthroughs" were imagined decades ago. What's changed isn't just the technology, but the economics and engineering needed to make it practical
I often find fully working LCD monitors discarded by people who have no use for them, and could easily collect five or more of them that way if I had a convenient way to "wire them up" to my laptop.
I think the current driver restricts you to 4 displays but I'm not entirely sure why (you can do 6 on Windows so I think it must be a driver issue).
Of course, with your RPi idea, you could connect one computer to dozens or maybe hundreds of serial ports, but if all you want is five more screens, USB should do fine for your needs.