awesome story! I got the impression in my research that these were used pretty heavily by Sun themselves, it's always interesting to hear first hand accounts.

That must've been cool, but my understanding is that every place outside of sun, these things were a failure. The network wasn't fast enough, or they weren't configured right, or whatever, and the result was entire university computer rooms unused while the one next door with actual computers in it was full.

Nice coincidence! I worked there from '99 as was partly involved in the Dutch launch of them. I still have a few SR2's and SR3's at home.

@@kyle8952 The answer was almost always youtube. As soon as you tried to do video playback they didn't really cut it. I ran them with SunVDI, with Windows and Ubuntu desktops. They were perfect for sysadmin work, taking your session from the office, datacenter and then home completely seamlessly. Laptop not required. But if you needed to have video for some reason, it just didn't work. Even Sunray 3's on a decent network had pretty poor playback. Only very specific video streams would work with acceleration.

@@kyle8952 Exactly. Everyone had the wrong idea of what these things were; they're just rather dumb terminals. Unless you have a very beefy ($$$$$) server behind them, they're going to suck. If you try to do almost anything realtime interactive (i.e. video), it's going to suck. Windows (err, Citrix -- windows stole that shit) partially moves video rendering to the client (not 3d stuff, so games suck) so video usually worked ok. I never saw very many Sun Ray's. People would get one or two for evaluation, confirm they're "crap", and move on. I saw thousands of windows terminals. (have one in the floor next to my desk.) As you can run Citrix on Solaris/Sparc, there was no reason to go with Sun's stuff.

That sounds like black magic. I don't think most people knew how amazing that was in its day.

very cool! exactly the use case Sun had envisioned. I think Sun themselves used these pretty heavily.

Yep, it was very cool. We had these deployed in 57 offices in the US lower 48, and around the globe but I never got to test those. You could insert your card basically anywhere on the network and get your session. Some took longer than others, but it always worked. Indeed this was super cool at the time. Honestly this is the direction we thought computing was going at the time. It was kind of thought mobile is getting better, really a person just needs a mobile device (BB or Palm or whatnot) which will have their email/messages/apps and they wouldn't need to carry a laptop, just cruise into the office with your smartcard, sit down at your desk and bam you're working. Funny how things don't always turn out the way we think they will. This is still very cool tech.

I heard this story. Curious who your friend was and if I know any people who knew them.

For the time? That's impressive right now lol.

haha thanks!

Best Basement Computing for sure

that's awesome. you're right though, it's so easy to get these things online. In fact they immediately detected the SMB shares on my TrueNAS. Definitely not that easy in Windows 98.

In my field, we used an UltraSPARC Solaris system till ~2019

that's awesome!

​@@clabretroI feel old af I used them In high school my freshman year 2002 and I helped setup them from sophomore to senior years of school.

@@clabretro We were using them with Trusted Solaris, so it was quite an interesting setup.

@@Natsumidragneelkim Man, your highschool was cool. Mine just had a bunch of Pentium-based Compaqs. At least the security on Windows 98 was somewhere between "nonexistent" and "completely nonexistent".

nice! I've got a Sun Fire X2200, haven't tried running the Sun Ray software on it though.

ive got macintosh work group servers those are the rarest things i have and I have the server software to its kind of cool they added it over top of the consumer os the machines even have audio to.@@clabretro

I also had these at my local library!

Interesting! I've heard the smart cards are used heavily in the military.

@@clabretro They are still used today by the us government for log in verification on computers

I'm surprised they aren't still around... the US military was/is one of the largest users of Solaris back in the day at least.

>The server is now in the cloud the server is just not home. and that's not yours. i can't accept this.

@@SilverSpoon_ The cloud is just someone elses computer :(

@@SilverSpoon_ we are not discussing your teeny tiny home computer. We're talking enterprise yeah. The systems discussed in this video were not home computers.

@@Felix-ve9hs read my comment. Your work system is not yours either, so what's your point?

@@zeveroarerules My job is to set up companies systems. And not every company is drooling trisomics without a sense of privacy or confidentiality, even if most of the time they have zero sense of secu. But imagine a system like this at home, you have your gamer PC on your basement and everything else, your laptop, tablet, TV/console is a terminal directly connected to your PC/server, even have multiple users. You can even use it from outside using your card to access it remotely and authentify with the same level of secu as in your bank. That would be neat. Your machine could even be on your basement to chill and still have terminals everywhere else. And not some cloud garbage, something that you own. That would be solid. Computers are computers.

thanks!

congrats!

thanks!

Thin clients for Citrix or regular terminal services has been a thing since for ever.

Intel Scalable with Nvidia V100s driving vGPUs, with Solaris hot vDesk driving everything at the worker's desk. The image of it in my head alone, it's beautiful. 🥺

thank you! more on the way

Ha that's awesome! Unfortunately I never saw these in the wild back in the day (or if I did, I didn't notice!)

When I was in college we had a Mac lab, sun lab with the gen 1 sun rays, and windows lab. It was very fun times

I can definitely see that being a thing and a fun way to do a tiering system or personalization - as in, having a personal card which loads your specific image so you get to keep settings and a set of reserved storage.

Or like, ya know, you could just have a laptop... or something.

Thin clients died out in part because the user experience of a local machine is just better in a lot of ways, network latency for every action taken makes certain kinds of work (or play) not really ideal. It made great sense in a world where bringing powerful computers with you from place to place was very expensive and heavy, but now we have pocket computers that can do pretty remarkable things and laptops are just a step above that with the size mostly being used to provide a comfortable screen, keyboard, and battery life There are tons of places in the world where internet cafes are still super popular, but they don't use thin clients. Even the most recent mass market attempts at thin clients for gaming have only really succeeded where absolutely necessary because emulation isn't feasible - that is, what Microsoft and Sony have done to support older games, but stuff like GeForce Now and Stadia just never really took off

Plus commodity hardware just gets cheaper and cheaper. I suspect it outweighs the overhead of buying + running the server.

I've pondered something like that with phones. You have a public kiosk but it's only the screen, keyboard, mouse, power, and maybe network, provided though a USB-C cable. Plug your phone in and use it like a PC. Honestly the biggest hangup for that right now is that phones suck at being PCs. The hardware is there but the OS would rather be a glorified KZfaq player.

thank you!

Don’t forget slow. Had to do a final on them. As each classmate finished the system ran faster.

The issue with staying with one setup because it was “good enough and worked” leads to no growth. Without growth and change something will come along and kill the company/civilization/product. Example Kodak created the first digital camera but didn’t sell it because it would ruin their film market and product. Then another company released it and Kodak was behind the curve and lost the market. That’s just one of the best examples of how keeping the status quo doesn’t work and typically backfires

I think the idea was good, not the hardware limitations.

As a user of 90s IT i assure you it did not work. Half my working life was wasted waiting for the computer to hurry up

@@crapmalls Well... this is something keeps being pretty crappy nowadays. Not talking about Azure Virtual Desktops or an almost non-laggy casual VPN RDP connection. I mean, in "low compute environments" like any kind of general stores. Lots of hiccups, slow, hanging while trying to request an invoice or to print something... this is something I experience almost every day. Main issue there, as always, is hardware limitations. When you are trying to go cheap with just a GbE card, 32GB of RAM, mechanical hard drives and at least 20 computers (thin clients) working/connected at the same time.

nice!

thank you!

interesting!

thanks! yeah couldn't believe it worked with that minimal setup, totally sufficient for what I'm up to. the sun ray 2s are pretty affordable and it's not too bad, give it a shot!

thanks!

ha thats awesome! you had that running at home?

nice! and thanks for watching!

Ha, excellent story. Thank you for watching!

nice! that VPN hotdesking between home and office is so cool.

ha thanks!

Awesome! yeah jumpstart is super impressive, amazing amount of configuration you can do.

@@clabretro as I recall the command from the os to get things rolling was something like “reboot -- ‘net - install’. Passing input to the boot prom from the OS. Witchcraft!

usb hub in display

very cool!

latency wasn’t bad?😊

@@possiblyanowl I remember it being OK, even with 1.5Mb DSL. Two factors were behind this, I think. First, it was a major area of focus for the dev team, and as a software engineer I pretty much just had 3 terminals open in 1 workspace and email in another. I have a vague memory of turning off blinking cursors, but it's been 15 years or more.

thanks!

thanks!

cool!

thank you! definitely more to come.

They did not invent it.

thanks!

Very cool. Yeah Sun pumped out a lot of good (and some just interesting) ideas.

thanks, in progress!

Ha, as I edited the video I thought of that. It's gotta be one of the things they were thinking about as these Sun Rays were geared towards the enterprise.

Yeah I've heard some credit cards work! Been meaning to try that out.

No family is going to want to use these :)

@@eadweard. my point was it would be fun to use for multiple users.

thanks!

thanks!

agreed!

thanks!

Ha that's an awesome story! Eh you might've been just as well off with a 486 haha. Recently learned of the linemiser and man, what a great name for an appliance.

thanks!

thanks!

Wow that's incredible, I know Sun bought Cobalt but I had never heard of the LX50. Let me know how it goes!

@@clabretro They are dual Pentium III 1U (Cobalt) servers. I do need to get a 42U rack since I had to pull some Suns out to make room for several NASes and also want to replace the smaller UPS with a larger redundant capable one.

I still can't afford the pizza box 😂. Cool that you got to play around with that DEC. I PXE booted Solaris x86 for a Sun Fire X2200... definitely more involved than the JumpStart. Will eventually setup a proper dedicated PXE boot server in my home lab.

Have a gander at the RaspberryPi 400. They can be made in to thin clients to just about anything you have laying around.

@@LiqtorI’ll definitley think about that. Thanks!

Definitely!

thank you!

thanks!