Comment by alexellisuk
6 hours ago
Interesting 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.
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.
Used these at work at my first job. A dozen developers, each with an HP X Terminal all booting/running programs off of a central HPUX server that was less powerful and had less RAM than a basic desktop PC of today.
Similar situation at my first job. I got yelled at for running Xeyes because it chewed up too much CPU.
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When I got to the university, we had a DG/UX server, the usual green and ambar phosphor text terminals, and the few lucky ones IBM X Windows terminals, which were mostly used to manage several xterms, given the choice of applications at the time.
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).
It took me a long time to adjust to a PC environment after being minicomputer/mainframe-based for a lot of my key years (from age 15 through 22, my main access to computing was through college/university systems running VAX/VMS, VM/CMS and a bit of Unix. TBH, other than its lack of pipes and a command path, I generally preferred VMS to Unix, with the VAXstation being my preferred working environment.
Never worked with VAX/VMS, however have spent enough time reading through its manuals.
Systems programming with compiled BASIC, its Extended Pascal version, the API surface that somehow we can find traces where Windows NT got its design inspiration from, really leaves some space for what ifs, in the operating systems adoption evolution.