We had hundreds of them. Fantastic technology, really secure and reliable. Wish I had saved a few, threw them all out shortly after Oracle acquired Sun. Moved to HP and Dell thin clients with VDI. All the problems and patches and maintenance of that environment paid for a really big new house for me, lots of overtime. Thanks Microsoft/HP/Dell/VMware!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm a huge Sun dork, so I play around with OI every now and then.. but every time I try to use OI in libvirt I have a problem where the display is cut off. This only happens when using resolutions bigger than 1024x768, and if you mouse over to that area the screen will shift over to the missing bit, so it's sort of usable.. but maddening haha.
I'm pretty sure I can see the same thing happening in the picture of the sunray client they have on this page. The left hand side of the screen is cut off (you should see the clock and syspanel icons on the top left).
If I'm understanding you correctly, you have access to the entire desktop but some of it is off-screen at any given time, with the displayed area following the mouse?
This is a feature that some graphical desktops used to have back when 640x480 and 800x600 monitors were still common, the desktop resolution could be set independently of the display resolution, so you could have a larger framebuffer that your monitor presented a view in to. I recall some graphics drivers (Matrox for sure) added this to Windows 9x and called it "virtual desktop" and I know I've seen it on a few *nix platforms too.
I'd assume if the resolution adjustments work as expected below 1024x768 that whatever graphics driver OI is using in your VM only sees the virtual display as capable of 1024x768 at max and so it does this if directed to provide a larger desktop.
Fond memories of buying cheap Sun gear around 2005-2007. I had an E4500, Blade 1000, and a Tadpole SPARCbook 6500 that I ran Solaris 10/11 on along with a couple of Sun Rays. Used the Blade 1000 as a Sun Ray server and it was a great experience. Glad to see it is still alive and kicking in some form.
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.
The login cards were the killer feature on them(at the time). I managed a fleet of them things spread all over 4 buildings. Being able to work in one location, get up and goto another and just pickup what you were doing was INSANE in that day and age. Slapping in a keycard do it all was unheard of.
We had citrix and sunray in those days. Citrix was for those that had BIG BIG BIG money and needed windows. We were a java shop, so it was either an e450 in the server room and sunrays, or ultra5s at every desk.
I never got to use this, but it seems like it would hit my dream computing environment (which has since advanced to an idea that my phone would fill that role so I could be working on my phone, plug my phone into a desktop or laptop workstation, continue working there, unplug, continue on the phone, move to another computer, etc. Apple’s Handoff almost scratches that itch, but it’s not quite as reliable or ubiquitous as I would like and the ideal would be that I have my whole working environment portable via the phone.
Oh man, SunRays and e450s, desktop sessions that ran 24/7 on beefy servers accessible from anywhere, U5s with those type-V membrane keyboards... Every detail of your post makes me warm and fuzzy with nostalgia. :-)
(Except the Citrix. I never admin'ed that, only used it for a few gigs.)
We had hundreds of them. Fantastic technology, really secure and reliable. Wish I had saved a few, threw them all out shortly after Oracle acquired Sun. Moved to HP and Dell thin clients with VDI. All the problems and patches and maintenance of that environment paid for a really big new house for me, lots of overtime. Thanks Microsoft/HP/Dell/VMware!
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.
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.
The predecessor that the Sun JavaStation “Krups” is one of my all time favorite computer design https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?threads/the-sun-javastation-...
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
Image for UK-based readers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaStation#/media/File:Sun_Mi...
Wow that's... hideous. I assume they didn't mean it was their favourite design aesthetically!
Taste is subjective after all. I'd say it has a certain late 90s charm to it.
Thanks for sharing, that brings back good memories.
Here is another one, from the first JavaStation,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxV_pR1ZsXM
Sun was my favourite UNIX vendor, oh well.
I'm a huge Sun dork, so I play around with OI every now and then.. but every time I try to use OI in libvirt I have a problem where the display is cut off. This only happens when using resolutions bigger than 1024x768, and if you mouse over to that area the screen will shift over to the missing bit, so it's sort of usable.. but maddening haha.
I'm pretty sure I can see the same thing happening in the picture of the sunray client they have on this page. The left hand side of the screen is cut off (you should see the clock and syspanel icons on the top left).
Anyone know why this happens? And how to fix it?
If I'm understanding you correctly, you have access to the entire desktop but some of it is off-screen at any given time, with the displayed area following the mouse?
This is a feature that some graphical desktops used to have back when 640x480 and 800x600 monitors were still common, the desktop resolution could be set independently of the display resolution, so you could have a larger framebuffer that your monitor presented a view in to. I recall some graphics drivers (Matrox for sure) added this to Windows 9x and called it "virtual desktop" and I know I've seen it on a few *nix platforms too.
I'd assume if the resolution adjustments work as expected below 1024x768 that whatever graphics driver OI is using in your VM only sees the virtual display as capable of 1024x768 at max and so it does this if directed to provide a larger desktop.
Fond memories of buying cheap Sun gear around 2005-2007. I had an E4500, Blade 1000, and a Tadpole SPARCbook 6500 that I ran Solaris 10/11 on along with a couple of Sun Rays. Used the Blade 1000 as a Sun Ray server and it was a great experience. Glad to see it is still alive and kicking in some form.
Ah OpenSolaris, good to see you survived, but oh boy it aches my heart every time I hear your name. Just like ZFS
This reminds me of one of my favorite youtube channels, clabretro: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjeznAUfx0OfCseO3gKOv...
When I saw "Sun Ray", the first thing to come to my mind was clabretro :)
So cool!! I thought SunRay was dead forever!
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.
The login cards were the killer feature on them(at the time). I managed a fleet of them things spread all over 4 buildings. Being able to work in one location, get up and goto another and just pickup what you were doing was INSANE in that day and age. Slapping in a keycard do it all was unheard of.
We had citrix and sunray in those days. Citrix was for those that had BIG BIG BIG money and needed windows. We were a java shop, so it was either an e450 in the server room and sunrays, or ultra5s at every desk.
I never got to use this, but it seems like it would hit my dream computing environment (which has since advanced to an idea that my phone would fill that role so I could be working on my phone, plug my phone into a desktop or laptop workstation, continue working there, unplug, continue on the phone, move to another computer, etc. Apple’s Handoff almost scratches that itch, but it’s not quite as reliable or ubiquitous as I would like and the ideal would be that I have my whole working environment portable via the phone.
Oh man, SunRays and e450s, desktop sessions that ran 24/7 on beefy servers accessible from anywhere, U5s with those type-V membrane keyboards... Every detail of your post makes me warm and fuzzy with nostalgia. :-)
(Except the Citrix. I never admin'ed that, only used it for a few gigs.)