The Headless Computer

24 Apr 2015 Written by David Walz

The Headless Computer

That’s what you call a computer with no monitor, keyboard or mouse.

The way I see it, the perfect computer is the invisible computer. Tucked away. Silently working. Doing exactly what it should, with minimal human interaction. We created computers to perform the work we didn’t want to do or were not capable of doing. These type of drone computers exist everywhere. If you’ve ever been to a website on the interwebs, chances are you have taken advantage of a headless computer. Yes, a server that dishes out a website to your face, is most likely a headless computer.

Examples of headless machines include:

• Web servers
• Game servers
• File servers
• Home servers
• Automobile computers
• Most microprocessors (Arduino is an example)

If you are like me, you have a couple Raspberry Pis laying around. Especially now that the Pi 2 is out. What do we do with the old ones?

Good question.

I have my Pi running without a monitor, keyboard or mouse. I control it through the network using SSH. (you learn more about that here.) This is a great setup if you are using your Pi to run tasks and programs that you don’t want to burden your main machine with. My Pi is mostly used as a playground for whatever I’m interested in at the time. I do however, run testing scripts on mine and have it hooked up to a cronjob. This goes back to the ‘silently working’ idea I like so much.

What would you use a headless computer for?

Let us know below. We might follow up with some more headless talk.