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This is hot! I -- like maybe everyone at Sun in the late 1990s and early 2000s? -- had a soft spot for SunRay. The original SunRay demo from Duane Northcutt to the Solaris Kernel Group in February 1999 (when it was a Sun Labs project code-named Corona) was just... jaw-dropping. Later, it was a point of personal pride that one of the first, concrete, production use-cases for DTrace came on a SunRay server (an experience that we outlined in §9 of our USENIX paper[0]). I'll always be sentimental about SunRay -- and Sun's misexecution with respect to SunRay was a lingering disappointment for many of us.

[0] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...

Oracle killed it and we all moved to Windows PCs.

Long before Oracle killed it, Sun fumbled it, sadly. The failure of SunRay to live up to its potential -- and it clearly had tremendous potential -- was Sun at its most frustrating: the company tended to became disinterested in things at exactly the moment that really called for focus.

As a concrete example, the failure to add USB printing support killed SunRay at airline kiosks in the early 2000s. American Airlines was the first airline to adopt kiosk-based check-in; they were very hot on SunRay, but needed USB printing. When American found out that Sun had just gutted the team (including everyone responsible for USB support!), they (reluctantly!) used Windows-based PCs instead. Sun tried to put the group back together, but it was too late -- and every airline followed American's lead.

Could/would SunRay have been used for airline kiosks? There are reasons to believe that it would have -- and it was certainly a better technical fit than an entire Windows PC.

There were examples like this all over the place, not just with SunRay but at Sun more broadly; despite the terrific building blocks, Sun often lacked the patience and focus to add the polish needed for a real product. (Our frustration with Sun in this regard led us to start Fishworks in 2006.[0])

RIP SunRay -- and what could have been!

[0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2008/11/10/fishworks-now-it-can...

> Long before Oracle killed it, Sun fumbled it,

Oracle did try to monetize SunRay but for whatever reason it didn't meet their profit threshold. It was fantastic technology and I'm almost certain I still have the dual monitor variation in my basement somewhere.

The Sun Ray is a strong inspiration for building https://warpstations.com (currently in closed beta).

The main challenge has been building a modern remote desktop protocol that achieves high performance but without requiring GPUs for each user and works on Linux. VNC is really showing its age, and X forwarding isn't really usable over the Internet. We are also using Yubikeys instead of smart cards, though I'm looking forward to testing some of the FIDO2 cards that are on the market.

One of our colleagues said something that really resonated with me "When you're working using our system it should feel like you're sitting down at a personal supercomputer". There are always more features to build, but the basic vision of being able to sit down at any desk with our Warpbox and connect to your virtual desktop within a few seconds is a really nice workflow.

This looks really cool. I didn't quite understand what the product did on the website, but once I read your comment, I got it.

Is there a short trial period before I pay? I didn't see it on the website. If it really does feel like real time usage like GeForce Now with gaming, then that is seriously cool.

Thank you for the feedback about the website. I'd love to hear more of your thoughts about what was unclear or how we could improve if you can email me (email in profile).

I'd be glad to set you up with credits to run the system through its paces. Right now our most valuable payment is feedback

Done!

I love these things. If you want to see them in action on video, check out clabretro on YouTube: www.youtube.com/@clabretro (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRO_M1S145M).

One of my favorite YouTube channels. I have such a nostalgic soft spot for late 90s to mid 2000s enterprise network and server tech :-)

The Phintage Collector also recently did some videos on Sun Ray: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gj_TktVOrtQ

This youtube channel was an absolute rabbit hole for me.

Sun Rays were so good. Being able to walk over to someone else's desk and say "hey, take a look at this" and swap your card for theirs and instantly have your desktop was such a great user experience.

Also enjoyed the keyboards (with control where caps lock "normally" is)...

I had trouble getting HP thin clients going when they were just months out of support. This is a mammoth undertaking, not to mention amazing documentation for anyone stuck with this technical debt.

I work at an e-waste recycling company. I had about 120 decommissioned HP thin clients come in last week. I'm still trying to figure out what to do with them. We have buyers that might be interested in them. I opened them all up and they all had 8 GB RAM and 128 GB SSD. While grinding through them, I realized that was more than the laptop I went to college with ~18 years ago. I haven't turned any on, but I would not be surprised if the CPUs in them are faster too. I didn't realize thin clients/dumb terminals had to be so powerful these days.

I never had much more than a passing familiarity with Solaris, so setting up SunRay's with OpenIndiana isn't something I've ever tried -- but the SunRay Server software actually supported Debian Linux! It is, obviously, similarly broken in the modern era, but I imagine it's possible to get working... some of the required files are at https://github.com/jwoglom/srs

Everyone now has fondness for these and for thin clients in general, but I don’t see this concept used in modern times. Is there any modern equivalent, in particular with the power of a workstation rather than a kiosk? Amazon’s WorkSpaces is anemic— low memory and high price, with their own marketing proposing it for contact centers and front desks. What modern thin client solution can truly replace full computers, especially with local / on-prem processing?

Oh we had a bunch of Sun thin clients in my university, in a dedicated room where we went to get tortured with various tests. They were complete sets, with Sun branded monitors, keyboards, and mice. The system you got into was something very stripped-down unix-like (probably Solaris, but at the time I assumed it was Linux), and it ran only two things: Firefox that could only access the testing website, and a timer counting down your booked session time. The smart card functionality was completely unused. They turned those things on remotely for you when you checked in at the reception.

p.s. what's up with the capitalization in this article? Sentences not starting with capital letters are harder to read.

> p.s. what's up with the capitalization in this article?

It's some irritating trend with a few folks. Like an "oh im too busy to bother with that".

Great to see. I used them at my work almost 20 years ago, I had one at home too for easy access. I later got a Tadpole Comet Sun Ray laptop purely for nerd reasons.

With modern network speeds it's interesting to consider how good a thin client could be these days.

At our company (almost entirely engineers) we're pretty near 100% thin client usage. It's nice to be able to "download more RAM" for a big analysis job and not have to go try to buy a new system or something.

I also travel a lot, and it's great to have all of my applications and data right where I left them from any desk in any office

Nice, what thin clients are you using? After Sun Ray, I tried an Axel one, but never really found a use case for it.

Originally we used PCoIP server software and various Zero Clients (they all run the same software). Their video performance is really great, but we found it very difficult to get support for basically anything else (USB, licensing, host OS, etc).

One thing lead to another and now we're building our own server software, thin client OS (no hardware yet, we load our image on COTS x86 devices), and public VDI cloud.

It might also be interesting to try https://github.com/jwoglom/srs which is GPLv2 and works with newer JDKs.

Edit but passed the window... Wrong link, should be https://github.com/classilla/kopenray

Gotta say that the card sticking out of the screen of the SunRay 270 looks properly goofy.

It does feel like a bunch of universities in particular could have taken advantage of something like this. Something akin to the laptop "close the lid and just open it back later whenever", but on all the desktops on campus. Sounds amazing in theory!

Probably a nightmare in practice to deal with though. There's so many advantages to having people turn off their machines.

That's definitely how we worked at the Sun offices. And since we hoteled, I never knew where I would be sitting. I loved it really. It felt very minimalist and slick.

That would be perfect, doubly so if the university switched to FIPS201-like student IDs for their door access too.

Just imagine, one ID that would work for both doors and computer access, no need for clunky username/password+2FA juggling. Just tap your card (and optionally, if a institution chooses, enter a pin for a second factor), and you're off to the races.

This could easily be implemented through mobile phones too, since most have NFC nowadays, if cost of credentials that can do asymmetric operations is a concern.

Of course, this would never happen, as both Academia and Access Control are extremely slow-moving fields stuck with decades of legacy solutions. The vast, vast majority of institutions still use what amounts to static unchanging ""passwords"" sent across the wire (usually unencrypted!) to authenticate users.

This is something I've been thinking of for a long time, and had no idea Sun had beat me to the punch long before I was even born! What a shame, they were really ahead of their time.

I don't know if any universities did that but it was reality in some health care and government installations. You just slapped your card into any terminal and all your apps sprang up on the screen right where they had been.

I wonder how difficult it would be to just take a packet capture of such a client booting up and connecting and then building a server from scratch - something that would convert between the Sun Ray protocol and bog-standard VNC. This would save a lot of the setup process and allow these clients to be used plug and play by just running a single server binary.

This has actually already been done! It just needs some love: https://github.com/classilla/kopenray

someone should reboot the Sun brand as a super high end laptop and workstation company. ~$10k price point. GPU or future tech, native virtualization to run simultaneous OS images, modular and upgradable like framework's products, droppable ruggedization, sim card and isolated secure element as a crypto module, same day replacement delivery worldwide.

could do the same with Atari, Cray, even a rebrand of SGI to Silicon General Intelligence. I miss muscular tech like that.

Oracle wouldn't let you do that with Sun.

Atari has been brought back! https://atari.com

HPE is using the Cray brand: https://www.hpe.com/us/en/compute/hpc/supercomputing/cray-ex...

Coincidentally, https://www.sgi.com/ redirects to the HPE Cray link above.

the Atari brand is cute, but those products are a bit schmaltzy. we should find a way to get control of one of these brands and do an LBO of an OEM like framework or system76 for manufacturing. Apple is out of ideas and they're never going to make it in enterprise, it seems like an opportunity.

I'm extremely jealous of Cloudflare getting the trademark for The Network is the Computer (https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-network-is-the-computer/)