(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

In the previous post I mentioned working on a large deployment of Citrix and NeoWare thin terminals. We were using ICA exclusively. But the NeoWare terminals also had this mysterious “NTRIGUE” protocol that I never had a chance to use:

Various brochures and ads about the HDS @workStation also mentioned that this thin client is for NTRIGUE with zero mention of Citrix or ICA!

All NTRIGUE and no ICA/Citrix! What is going on here?

And what exactly is NTRIGUE?

In short: Isignia company is mainly known for SoftPC and SoftWindows. Insignia NTRIGUE product was a version of Citrix WinFrame that used Xwindow / X11 protocol for the transport. X11 appears beside ICA in the WinStation protocol list.

After 30 years of waiting today I scored NTRIGUE box on eBay.

The CDROM is essentially Citrix WinFrame Based but everything is find / replace rebranded as NTRIGUE.

Even the NTOS kernel prints NTRIGUE…

And the login screen

The real deal comes from WinStation configuration. You can create one with X11 protocol instead of ICA:

But how do you use it? Very simply! In two ways:

XDMCP Query, either from a physical Xterminal or Xnest or Xephyr:

…yes so now any plain regular Xterminal like NCD, HP, Tek, IBM, DEC, etc can connect to a Windows host!

Second way – export NTRIGUE X11 client via remote display, like you would with xterm -display ... or export DISPLAY=.... with a trick. You can RSH into NTRIGUE box and request a client:

In practice:

It seems that the NT box runs a rsh daemon and can send you an X11 exported client via some sort of x11.dll. It looks like they ported X11 to NT:

Citrix ultimately acquired NTrigue from Insignia. Never to be heard from again. I believe this either became their X11 ICA Client or they just bought it to kill competition to ICA protocol. Which makes sense given that after Microsoft released Terminal Server Edition with RDP, ICA protocol and app management was all that Citrix had left to offer.

Finally a gallery of various UNIX systems talking to NTRIGUE:

You can download NTRIGUE from here: https://tenox.pdp-11.net/os/winnt/Apps/x86/ntrigue/

PS
I do have the license disk but it’s unreadable. I will read it with a flux reader in a few days.