Please note - Ndiyo has now officially closed its doors, at least as a legal entity - but we've kept the site alive in case any of the information is useful to others.

Our thanks to all those who helped out and were involved in so many different ways! The Ndiyo legacy lives on in the ultra-thin-client work at its spin-off DisplayLink, at Plugable, at NoPC and elsewhere...

How?

How did we go about it?

We saw our role as three-fold:

  • Alerting people to the fact that traditional networked computing will never be sustainable in the long term
  • Demonstrating that viable alternatives exist now and work in the real world
  • Enabling those who could benefit from these new models of computing to get access to it

In terms of technology, our strategy was to combine a novel kind of ultra-thin-client networking hardware with Open Source software.

Ndiyo stimulated the creation of a new company, DisplayLink, which produced a novel piece of hardware called the Nivo (Network In, Video Out). The Nivo was an ethernet-connected ultra-thin client, which if produced in sufficient quantity could allow provision of a networked computer workstation for something closer to the cost of a VGA cable than that of a PC!  DisplayLink now produces silicon for USB-connected graphics, which can be harnessed for Ndiyo-type operation using the Hubster model.

Combining the Nivo with open-source software on an Ndiyo server provides a robust, affordable and more sustainable way of providing a group of networked workstations. You can read about our system here. We operated a number of trial deployments of the Ndiyo system in various parts of the world.

Our object in doing this was to demonstrate that a radically different way of doing networked computing is not just desirable, but eminently feasible. We've found that nothing convinces people like being able to see for themselves.

Have a look at what makes up an Ndiyo system.