alt Hacker NewsInteresting to see it all play out through the post.. OpenIndiana is virtualized, the Sun Ray connects to it and runs like a thin client.
I hadn't heard of "Sun Ray" until today, but it reminds me a lot of the idea behind Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) - which I used on our school's IT lab back then at a teen. Set up an old i386 machine with the various netbooting daemons. Then on each host - boot from floppy disk, remove disk, insert in next machine until 20 hosts were running from that poor old hard drive.
The nice thing was that the installed OS on each was unaffected, and each machine was running X11 over the network.
Seems like those solutions were optimising for a time where hardware was overly expensive.
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Today if we say "open an xterm and type this command" we mean to start a program that runs in a window that has a text interface with a command line.
Here is an X terminal from around 1990.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal
It displayed everything over the network via X11 from a more powerful workstation / server.
> Datapro wrote in 1991 that X terminals could provide windowing capability, high-resolution graphics and relatively fast processing for prices starting around US$1,500, compared with workstations that could cost more than US$10,000.
This was perfectly normal at the time, my first UNIX developer experience was the traditional timesharing experience, one server for everyone.
Ironically cloud based development is nothing other than going back to these days, just with other set of technologies.
Remember, "The Network is the Computer" (1984).
When I was in Uni our IT department had rolled out Sun Ray systems and they were actually pretty cool. You'd have a smart card you'd insert into the device which would give you a login page. You'd log in, use your apps. If you had to leave, you pulled the smart card and left. Then you could go to another Sun Ray, maybe in another building, and insert your smart card and your session would pop up with your apps still open, etc.
It was very much like running an X11 server/terminal, except the session could stay open while you moved to another physical terminal. This was great for universities where you might be working on something, have to rush off to class, then could head back to a terminal to pick up where you left off. Also handy if you have long-running tasks that you don't want to interrupt.
Theoretically, given a sufficient networking configuration/VPN/etc., you could pull your smart card out of the Sun Ray in your university office, go home, and then drop your smart card into a Sun Ray at home and still have everything back where you left off.
It was basically the last great innovation of the mainframe/terminal server paradigm, as far as I'm aware. A little late to the party, since by that time most students in CS had laptops and the rest used computers at home, but still very cool.