Posted by todsacerdoti 7/1/2025
[0] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...
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...
Seems like a tricky problem but clearly at least some of it was solved given USB ports were on the machine
But I just realized the "USB printing support" stuff was maybe less about USB printers themselves and more about being able to have, say, 30 thin clients with 30 different printers hooked up but the application would know which printer was the right one (instead of showing 30 printers available, for example)
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.
Occasionally you'd find one where the security was about as well executed as the function they were meant for and there was some fun to be had, but not much.
I find it hard to have much sympathy for SunRay. Their advantages were supposed to be price, but they were never cheap, and security, but that required hiring engineers that understand mainframe unix security, which management just didn't do.
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.
I want the original promise of X, where I choose where apps run and they are displayed locally:
• Run CAD circuit layout app on Pro server.
• Run Adobe Premiere on GPU server.
• Run distributed `make` on build cluster.
And of course, I want to be billed in resource-seconds, not per hour of a host made available to me.
Well, maybe not directly so, but NX (or rather X2Go) over ssh or VPN was working fine for me some ten years ago. Before that I happily used Sun Rays, but maintaining the Sun Ray server software was tedious after Oracle gave up on 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.
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
Also enjoyed the keyboards (with control where caps lock "normally" is)...
There was a period however where semi-thin and semi-thick clients were being experimented with. Get you a fatter client, that uses thin client provisioning and can be pressed into service as a hot seat RDP/Citrix machine, or used solo for other basic purposes.
p.s. what's up with the capitalization in this article? Sentences not starting with capital letters are harder to read.
It's some irritating trend with a few folks. Like an "oh im too busy to bother with that".
With modern network speeds it's interesting to consider how good a thin client could be these days.
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
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.