It's sad that the networked way of working we could do back then seems to be gone forever. Just something simple as sitting on a workstation with an Emacs window or two.. and then having to leave that particular workstation to someone else, or the office itself, for whatever reason.. just tell emacs to display the frame (aka window) on another machine elsewhere. Move over, continue typing. Now we have clumsy "clouds" as a very poor substitute for the above. Ah, "security" took it all away.

Indeed. One really great thing about the X Window System was how it made sharing important resources easy and effective.

Say one has expensive simulation software of some kind. One could hop onto the machine it is licensed to, remote the display back home the local machine and the user is off to the races!

Some software was aware of the display, and there are some answers to that too, but the overall experience was simple that way.

Another use case is using data managed software. Users can log onto the application server and run the app. The app interacts with the data which the users could never see. Back in the day, being able to do that meant operating at local disk speeds! Stuff went super fast!

Multi user graphical computing was what the X Window System was designed to deliver and it does do that.

Maybe my least favorite, but damn interesting was computers with multiple heads. Say one has 3 screens, keyboards, mice, whatever else they might need.

The login environment can be setup so that each user gets a screen

DISPLAY = LOCALHOST:0 :1 :2

...OR

A User gets all the screens

DISPLAY = LOCALHOST:0.0 :0.1 :0.2

Or any mix.

A beefy machine could support three users just like being networked, but all on the same box. The SGI Deskside Onyx could be used this way, supporting at least 2 users with a badass hardware box close by.

Users on the same machine enjoyed local transfer rates for sharing data. Today that may not be such a big deal, though it really could be depending. Earlier, it was a big deal due to networks just not being all that fast for at least the decade since multi-head hardware was more common.

In short, having multi-user computing was like a computer with a bunch of users connected by RS232, or the like.

Multi-user networked computing is everywhere today. Each user has at least one computer with all of them networked together.

Multi-user graphical computing is the thing some of us do not want to exist anymore. :( That is where there are multiple users, an optional network, and multiple displays and in particular, display systems are network transparent.