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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ก.ย. 2024
- How to setup Sun Ray thin clients for Hotdesking. Part 1 of several videos deep-diving on these Sun Microsystems thin clients.
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Video on Sun enterprise hardware prompts: • Troubleshooting Sun Fi...
Previous Sun Ray video: • Setting up Sun Ray Thi...
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Logging in and moving sessions really should be so easy. This was a dash of user-friendly capability theory in the early 00s.
I worked at Sun in the late 90s and the switch from a desktop Sun Ultra to the SunRays was a huge step forward. They were so much faster, and the server my engineering group was connected to had like over 100 cpus. Popping the smart card out to go show a coworker something or run a demo in a conference room was great. (or, as a junior engineer, to go squat in an office with a window for the afternoon.) Video, audio, even 3d graphics were no problem since none of it ran on the client. The Network Is The Computer.
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.
What an epic piece of hard- and software. Glad you're devoting three videos to it as you probably couldn't possibly do it justice in just one. Thanks for preserving those precious bits of computing history!
thank you!
I've been binging your channel the last few days in my down time. It makes me really want to have a space like yours to tinker with stuff.
I hope you continue posting content like this. Great job!
thank you! more on the way
I used to work for Sun and these were amazingly productive. It was your door card as well as your login. You could pass someone your card to get a PR or move to a meeting room and immediately bring up your desktop. Peak computing.
Loved using the SunRay until they were discontinued. Terrific for WFH and then doing to an office and just picking up where you left off.
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.
I have one of the older HP Thin Clients but it came without a smartcard reader.
Really cool concept which probably is better than to remember a password to most.
I remember attending the keynote of an OOW back in 96 or 97. Larry Ellison was talking about NCA. It seems that finally he was able to turn into reality.
Yes, the way I saw this set up was connected to a Sun monitor with an integrated hub (apparently they were doing this way before most other companies). I used one for awhile and it held up to modern monitors in 2015. And I also heard these thin clients did not see much use outside of Sun, so it makes sense that their environment drove the product.
Looked after a network populated with these - marvellous system - the only reason the customer upgraded was the browser could be upgraded.
Very cool! I would love to have a super powerful server and install thin clients all throughout my house. :)
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!
Man... so many memories! I bought the Solaris 9 when it came out. You paid like $25 bucks and came with a bunch of books and install media for all the architectures. I'm excited for the SunPCI install!
Only time I ever saw these was AT sun Microsystems in Burlington MA. they had quite the computer museum there (they just called it a data center) but old stuff still running from the late 90s way into 2010.
We used these at a startup in Sweden around 2000. Really cool. Great for hot swapping desks. A bit ahead of it's time. Would be much better now with the more flexable works places we have. I assume you could do this over the internet now considering the amount of bandwidth we have now.
nice! yeah even these can VPN but they only have 10/100 nics.
So cool to see this in action. Thank you!
I remember those. And the Sun sales peeps trying to sell them to our financal Big Iron shop. Ie: an exercise in pushing a string.
The good ole days, I still own some products from Sun
This brings back memories to managing a huge Sun Ray thin client setup.. thanks! Happy to see this in my recommendations. Great video and subbed!
thanks!
Imagine they brought back such a system for organizations.
But in this day and age, that's going to require some serious OpSec planning
I wouldn’t be surprised if this system was used by universities and internet cafes in the late 1990s and early 2000s! :)
Computer science/IT, from what I can tell, has been oscillating between full clients/workstations and thin clients/terminals since the beginning
Now I want to see how this works with a cluster of Sun Ray servers!
I know, I've been thinking about that haha
ok legit this is seriously cool, great video
thanks!
We had a sun ray lab at our university. It was where all the (not) cool kids hung out... like myself.
I mistakenly believed hotdesking was the same as hot boxing. Regardless, I found this video very interesting 😄
😂
"Era of tears" -- Sunset away.
ShOcK & AWE. This is the 2nd COoLest thing I've ever seen. Those "Smart Cards"? I'M IN LOVE.♥ .. I had no idea they could work like this. The company I worked with back in the day would have gone ape $hit over this (they would have never paid for it, but still ape $hit). Like McDonalds; I've lovin it. How could I not hit the subscribe button? Thank you for the video. Cheers from So.CA.USA 3rd House on the Right.
thanks!
about the usb on front of the sun ray 2. yes the keyboards you would have gotten had an USB hub build into them.
Hello, smart card chips have a lot of variation in terms of design, but not pinout or function. As far as I can see, the one you bought should be compatible, have you tried them?
I did, but no luck. could perhaps be the brand, going to try some others.
Are there other uses other than something like a Hospital, where people might move around, and quick very quick access? I know of these card based logins to thin clients since about 2001. Never seen one in use, but always wondered, if there are some other practical uses for it.
Based on marketing I think they were targeted towards "office" type work (word documents, excel). My understanding is that Sun themselves had a huge Sun Ray installation in their own offices too.
RIP Phillips Pinnacle, xsnow will never fall again on the uninitiated!
You make cool vids
Thanks!
With how smart RMIT is I'm amazed how they haven't got this system where you can actually tap your students card login to the computer and that's just not just with my university I'm amazed how the universities have not adopted this login technology the only place that they have seen it in use is with the printer services all the universities should adapted this or adopted this technology because it would be so easy where you could just tap your students to login or if you're a teacher your staff card to log onto the computers using a card reader and the access credentials from the students cards or using your staff cards would be way more secure than always remembering a password why can they do it with the Printers but they can't do it with the computers
It really cool how cards works. But it better to have portable card read instead of embbed but guessing to prevent hacks. It feel like those steam game hardware few year very bare minimal video stuff.
Sun rays were brilliant. But the high pricing and not releasing the PC sun ray emulator, severely limited it’s appeal.
Quality content.
Why does this feel like the future
We had the Sun Ray 2 clients at work with Windows XP. They were really bad for our needs. 😢
Highly doubt that the Sun Ray Admin panel is a Java Applet, since those aren’t (to my knowledge, dunno if MS added it with IE mode) supported in Edge. When I had to use one to configure a Nortel switch I had to use IE.
yeah definitely, wouldnt have worked in that modern browser. i suspect it's a mostly server-side J2EE app.
Literally Thin Client
Is it still alive? I used to work insolaris OS but thought it is dead
Not in widespread use anymore, that's for sure.
the original sun keyboards had usb hubs built in.
Does anyone have the solaris sparc version of quake two by the way?
It seems to exist but I can't find any demos for download anywhere...
I'd love to try playing that on a sun ray in a CDE session :D
BROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO ghagaggaga
A friend of mine who worked for Sun in Switzerland told me a story about having to fly to Sun headquarters. At the end of the work day, he simply pulled his card (so didn't end the session) and drove home to catch the flight the next day. When he got to Sun HQ, he was curious what would happen if he put the card into a thin client. So he did and waited for some time (...), but eventually the session was available again as it had been the previous day. Very impressive for the time.
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.
TH-cam's premiere retro Sun Microsystems creator is back with another heavy hitting thin-client extravaganza!
haha thanks!
Best Basement Computing for sure
These were actually in a library at my school waayy back when I was in high school and taking a supplemental computer course.
The servers backing were something like a sunfire x4150 or something similar.
I've had fascination with them ever since then, this is super cool!
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!
Back in high school, in 2001, I went on a week long 'IT Careers Forum' here in Australia. It was basically a way for people who were interested in an IT Career, to get information, and make contacts in the industry. Sun had a whole room full of these things set up for us to play around with, and a full presentation on how these were the future of office systems and would completely replace individual workstations. As a kid, I was blown away, as all we had at school at the time was barely-functioning-networked Win98 machines.
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.
We should have stayed at this point in IT. It was good enough and worked.
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.
Would be really cool to make an Internet cafe using thin clients and smart cards (not sure if anyone would use such a place in the modern day but I like the idea; would be cool too if you had different tiers of card for different session specs, like, a card that just gives you a simple machine that can do basic stuff like web browsing, a different card that connects you to a gaming PC, and maybe a third card for an extra powerful computer (something capable of intensive workloads like AI training or video editing).
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 TH-cam player.
I remember when I worked at SunSoft and we got the demo and overview of the SunRay in the late 90s. It was literally a video card with a network card stuck up it’s backside. Ever since then I was hooked. After leaving Sun and when the SunRay 1 came out I bought 10 to replace a number of Engineers Sparc 2 / 5 systems to a shared e450. Fun was had by all .
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".
This is the future that I always wanted but never got.
Hey! This brought up so many many many memories of fidgeting with stuff to use the SunRay server packages on Debian, back when I was on college in 2009.
I still have very fond memories of these terminals, though we had those massive 30 lb CRT-laden SunRay terminals then.
Also, being a public college, we only had one Javacard, kept under lock and reserved for the root user. BUT, we got username/password hotswap working, so, win some lose some, I guess.
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
Imagine how cool this would be with modern servers as the backend.
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. 🥺
it's amazing to me that someone came up with an idea like this - to be able to move your work from one computer station to another. This is something we could have used in the average military office, when I was there 10 years ago. We used smart cards to log into our network, but the IT department was too entrenched in the paradigm of "individual computers attached to a network email server".
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.
Managed a lab with SunRay 150s at a University in early 00s. Great system and the students loved the smartcards. Being able to rush out of the lab to go to class and then come back after continue their session -- priceless!
Used these as a visitor to Sun and (oddly perhaps) to IBM and on training courses at Sun a quarter of a century ago. The smart cards made them magical, to be able to sit down at amy terminal on the network and get your session(s) up in a couple of seconds was amazing. We all envied it and nothing else in the market came close to that degree of functionality.
back in the day, the Sun mouse/keyboard would actually be a daisy chain. The sun keyboard into the Thin Client, then the mouse into the Sun keyboard.
usb hub in display
Ran these on x86 hardware for NOCs. I had a VPN appliance at my house and could hotdesk between office and home. I miss Sun Microsystems 😢
nice! that VPN hotdesking between home and office is so cool.
Sun was always an incredible company, making products way ahead its time...
And Oracle ruined all of it.
Woah! This is such a cool idea that I've never seen done before - and it has that retro charm as a bonus ;)
I loved seeing these working on camera - can't wait for the next part!
thanks!
It's kinda fascinating to see we are moving back to that more and more. The server is now in the cloud, but they principle remains the same :)
>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.
The shoutout to The Serial Port channel is a great thing. Thank you. Your video was really informative and I wish more people would watch your channel. Hold on !
thanks!
Oh, this brings back memories. Used a sunray as my main desktop for a number of years, loved the smart card hotdesking functionality. Can't remember what it was running on, I think possibly a netra X1.
Also had one of the SunPCi cards before I had the sunray setup in a UltraSparc5 desktop.
Still got some of the smart cards somewhere. :)
ha thats awesome! you had that running at home?
that moment when you finally realize that your 'smart chip' on your credit card is actually running java.
Sun had lots of interesting ideas before they folded. This one, contrary to the rave reviews in the comments below, never caught on with customers and has faded into obscurity. In some circumstances, it's great; in others, not so much. If you are willing to store all of your personal information on Google Drive, then you might also like this.
You’ve only gone and done it!
Excited for this series and collaboration with The Serial Port!
Keep it up dude!
thank you!
So, those Dell screens of yours have an inbuilt usb hub so you could go sunray->screen with a usb cable then plug mouse and keyboard into the screen. It was one of the nice features of dell monitors from this age.
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.
I actually co-wrote the training course on these when I contracted at Sun. Still have a few. Great place to work.
cool!
Not a design flaw with the USB. You need a Sun keyboard kit which always famously daisy chained the mouse off of the keyboard (even pre USB).
or use the hub in lcd
This is so coo!l it doesn't even feel retro to me. It's too bad this didn't catch on more. Sun (and other scientific workstation gear) was just so damn expensive back then. I wanted to get a pizza box sun so bad but couldn't afford one. I ended up messing with DEC alpha for a while but never got it doing anything interesting. Just fun stuff to learn on.
I've gotten PXE boot to work on Linux and freebsd recently but it's a huge PITA.
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.
I worked on a project using Sun Rays. Interesting devices. With some work we got them to do some pretty cool stuff. The nice thing is there is no persistent data on them and the card lets your session follow you around
Nothing was quite as sexy as SunVDI, basically run pools of virtual desktops, with pretty much any operating system you could run in a VM.
VM pools all cloned from a single machine instance, storage backed by ZFS, and when you added Tarantella into the mix, you could go from having your virtual desktop on a sunray, or move it over into a web browser instance, or later into the client on an iPad.
Sad that Oracle ended the product line, it was such a clean solution, that didn't tie you to only windows desktops with the kludge that is RDP+PCoIP and allowed you to run completely network isolated virtual desktops.
Never had a Sun Ray but I remember when they came out. I was managing hundreds of Sun workstations that were running CAD apps and jumpstart was the best tool in the arsenal. I could use cron to reload workgroups automatically over the weekend so the designers came in on Mondays to freshly loaded machines. It was like magic.
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!
Oh my God, memories. I spent a few years selling and setting these up at big companies. I think we deployed about 5000 clients from 2008 to 2010.
nice!
Back in the early 2000's a company I worked for sold hardware to Sun which was down the street from us (campus in Broomfield, CO). They needed some Windows servers, which I built them and got done early for them. Which the group working on that (mainly for compatibility testing, etc), they went, "Hey, you want to install them in the rack? We have a spot". Which of course I was game for seeing a data center. I got to see this system you are playing with live, with working for door access to computer access, and elevator access to the data center. That campus had multiple data centers, but these went into the main data center, which we had to take an elevator down underground to still the largest data center I've been in (and I've been in some huge ones and worked in some huge ones). Still 20+ years later one of my favorite experiences (up there doing same thing with StorageTek and getting to see the silo's being built and the tapes being loaded/unloaded and handed off between silos).
that is very very cool. love the story!
Honestly this would be a ton of fun to have around the house with a family on any Linux distribution instead of Oracle Solaris.
No family is going to want to use these :)
@@eadweard. my point was it would be fun to use for multiple users.
this bring back good old memories. Retired peacefully from IT Tech job since 2022.
congrats!
I love the aesthetic of the card slot glowing with the card sticking out.
Thinking back to my undergrad days about 20 years ago, this would have been so much nicer in our computing labs than the Dell boxes running Windows 2000 and Novell Netware. If you were in the middle of something and wanted to pop out for a quick cup of tea, it was either log out, or lock the workstation and hope nobody reboots it in the 5 minutes you're gone. The possibility of just removing my smart card from a thin client, then coming back later to continue from where I left off, at a different terminal, as if nothing had happened... that would have blown my mind. Well, it's doing that right now anyway...
It would be spectacular to not have any Java after Sun sold to Oracle. Users have so much better commands and interfaces without Oracle. Agree? Servers would even run better via binary. Right? Would AMD, ASUS, HP, IBM, if WD not side with this?
There was a random room in my Sun building that had two sunrays side by side. I moved my session back and forth like 20 times when no one was watching. Still a slick implementation.
worked for Sun/Fr team back in the days
in fact those were used by companies who tried to reduce TCO (in fact sometimes to replace older sparc systems)
those were also used in call centers because network latency was not as important by today's standards.
05:15 - no, the cards are not different, at least not physically. The ISO spec you referred is only describing the low level electrical and signaling properties and in general how to talk to the card low level. But the actual data, structures etc. are not specified, those are mostly proprietary to the card (more specifically to the chip) vendor. Like SIM cards in mobile phones: the ISO spec is exactly the same, even the data structures are specified by 3GPP, yet you can only program the card with the vendor"s SW as the low level data structures are proprietary. Even the fact you buy a Javacard compatible card does not mean anything from this SUN projects point of view, as you need exactly the data on the card the SUN thin client needs, which is unique to SUN.
I can't find the link to download SRSS as shown in the video, can anyone help? Also, Solaris is available for x86. Not played with SRSS yet, but is it only Sparc based? I've got a Sun Ray 3 Plus and would love to have a tinker, but much easier to run Solaris in an x86 VM than get a Sun Fire V series server. Even though they're nearly 20 years old, they are going for silly money on ebay now.
Search for "Oracle Software Delivery Cloud." You have to make a free account but once you're in there you can search and find the Sun Ray software.
They actually have Solaris Sparc, Solaris x86 32/64, and Linux versions of the SRSS. I've only tried the Sparc version, but I don't think you'd have too much trouble in a VM.
@clabretro brill thanks will give that a go.
Modern day equivalent of this is Imprivata, except i'd say this solution is infinitely better
I hate you. I’m jealous. Liked the video within the first 30 seconds of it playing. I want that stuff so bad. 😭
Oooh, this should be good! Love the sun content.
The form factor of the chips don't really matter. Just look at your credit cards, and they are all different from each bank.
You know, some days I'd still prefer this. Computers as light tools to a specific purpose, not great steam engines to feed constantly.
I think the keyboard that came with the thin client has an USB output for the mouse, it was pretty common for such branded hardware.
I remember when I was working on the manufacturing for this project... Just found it all so interesting but seeing it working more in depth it's even more interesting
interesting!
I am having vague memories of looking at these for a payroll server.
Wow, I've used that in 2007. It was horribly slow.
I remember when the thinking was that thin clients would take over office environments everywhere, that "thick" clients would go the way of the dodo. Didn't quite work out that way but it's not difficult to see why IT heads & upper management would have loved it. In the end though, one size couldn't fit all (or even most) requirements, especially when a thin client station cost just as much as their PC counterparts and weren't mobile/usable outside of the corporate network.
Definitely!
Given the power consumption and low computational power of those thin clients, are they still of any use? Would it even make sense to use them as a torrent clients with a simple linux distro if the same could be achieved on an older smartphone?
I don't think they have an MMU, or more than enough memory for a frame buffer and a small network frame cache. Keep in mind this was the early 00s: there were no smart phones, only java phones.
I think they're just a historical novelty at this point. You'd probably just host any torrenting or apps on the server itself. I'll go over what it's actually like to use these as desktops in the next video!
yepp! agree 100% ONLY if the Internet was stable enough😮
Nothing like hot desking and getting share sticky keyboards and mice. Yuck.
This is what apple do now and they claim they are the first ones to use it. Sunblades were used 20 years ago.
The software linux lab of the Hochschule Fulda used to have these thin clients in the early till mid 2010s! And the bigger work station just to teach poor students to write semaphores, philosopher's problem in java on CDE and Solaris 10 without an IDE... When I graduated, they moved the lab to another building and started using OpenSuse. Ohhh the memories.
very cool!