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.

I'm guessing it's called StarLink because the design uses a Star network topology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_network

In the “the name got reused” section the article missed the Subaru usage of it.

I honestly thought this would be about Teledesic!

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