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.
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.
We used to have these at my workplace and always wanted to get one but they got thrown out and I didn’t manage to save one… And nowadays they are kind of rare to find on used marketplaces.
And of course you can still set them up today https://youtu.be/Fb0w5OT1U58
i_think_so•42m ago
I used to have a stack of those login cards from the Sun courses I took. (I think they gave them to us to to log in to the "attendance" system, but really they were just souvenirs to show your coworker when you got back.) They sat on my desk and were a marvelous kind of fidget device, like shuffling a very scanty deck of cards over and over.
I bought a gen 2 SunRay in the hopes that I'd get around to installing it in my LAN some day as part of my eternal To-Do list. Sadly, I trashed all of that stuff when Sun got eaten and Solaris turned into a niche tech that I was almost embarrassed to have on my resume. I wish I had that stuff now.
Thank you for submitting this link, and (if they come by here) thanks to the author for writing up such a lovely, nostalgic bit of work.