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That is how I and everybody else were developing software at my university around 1990. A few HP servers, character terminals or X11 servers. Then everybody got a Windows desktop at home powerful enough to work as on those X servers and it was game over.

I never saw a company developing on a shared server. Do you work for one doing that?

In that environment I expect developers to need separate environments not to stop all the team in case of mistakes. Let's say: docker containers running on the server instead of pulling an image locally. I don't see much of a gain.

Personally I could use my emacs to edit files of the server, my terminal to ssh on the server and my browser getting pages from there. For people using IDEs, those IDEs should either work in a different way or be in a remote connection (RDP, VNC, X11.) I remember Citrix thin terminals but I don't remember developers using them. They were for end users.


regularfry
I've worked at a company where we used a shared server, relatively recently. Isolated environments were different /home directories and agreed port ranges. Actions that interfered with other folk were mistakes that happened once, because we were (for the most part) not a bunch of raging arseholes and were capable of talking to each other like adults.

It was a lovely environment to work in, in part because sharing our work was a matter of "yeah, I've stood that up on port 6001, can you take a look?" Or "take a look at /home/foo/whatever.py, I think the bug's in there but I can't spot it".

The other part was that it was an absolute beast of a machine for the time. RAM for days, and more cores than hot dinners. And, critically, a very close match to our production machines. That matters more than you'd think, for a large set of problems.

pramodbiligiri
This sounds fascinating. What was the config of that beastly dev machine, if you can tell?

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