Posted by todsacerdoti 7/1/2025
could do the same with Atari, Cray, even a rebrand of SGI to Silicon General Intelligence. I miss muscular tech like that.
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.
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.
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 loathe them.
I worked for A Large Government Agency that was deeep into the Sun ecosystem and was using a Sparcstation 5 workstation well into early 2000s running GIS, RF analysis, and report writing tools. It was a 24x7 operation with shifts of users logging in and out every 12 hours and those systems were never not in use and never powered off. They, and the software, were practically flawless.
Then we switched to Sun Rays. For "security" and "cost". It was a disaster. The latency even just across a couple of floors, was terrible. They spent more on titanically large, best-of-the-best, fantastically equipped servers and immediately the several hundred users trying to use them overwhelmed disk I/O, network throughput, and memory capacity.
We had to log in in staggered blocks, with 5-minute gaps between groups of 20 or so people inserting their cards.
My memory is starting to fade but I recall there being absurd amounts of downtime, with weekly briefings about capacity upgrades and equipment installs and the constant presence of network and server installers dragging pallet jacks and ladders around the facility.
"Oh the servers were underspecc.." NO. They were not. They were literally and actually millions upon millions of dollars of the absolute best and most capable servers Sun sold. We had Sun employees working in our facility. They had an open spigot of cash flowing from the Large Government Agency directly into their accounts to do carte blanche whatever they needed to do to make it work.
If the servers were over-subscribed it was because the ability to deploy that much capacity did not exist for any, infinite, amount of money and Sun knowingly and willingly ripped us off.
It never worked. The experiment made my professional life a living hell for several years.
In 2005-2006 they gave up and moved to Dell workstations running Windows XP professional using thrown-together Java or X11 versions of all of the applications.
Except for capacitors exploding at random intervals, it was "fine".
Moving from ancient vector-graphics GIS tools to Google Earth blew my mind though...
edit: literally never, ever, did anyone need the ability to pull their card out, walk over to another person's desk, and say, "Well hey Jim take a look at this!" and move their session.
Maybe here, but in other discussions surrounding Sun Rays there were decidedly mixed sentiments.
> The latency even just across a couple of floors, was terrible.
That sounds odd. In my experience, latency over public Internet (using the built-in Cisco compatible VPN client) across town was perfectly usable (much better than VNC over SSH using Linux hosts). The protocol they are using tries hard to minimizes the effects of network latency.
> several hundred users trying to use them overwhelmed disk I/O, network throughput, and memory capacity.
Yeah, that's much easier to see. Imagine thin clients being used these days with servers having many dozen GiB of RAM and NVMe storage ...
> We had to log in in staggered blocks, with 5-minute gaps between groups of 20 or so people inserting their cards.
I dimly recall having read about such. I wonder, whether that ever got fixed.
> Moving from ancient vector-graphics GIS tools to Google Earth blew my mind though...
Yeah, Sun Rays weren't a good fit for 3d graphics nor movies (which wasn't much an issue twenty years ago, but won't do today). Sun (Oracle?) produced an video clip advertising their use in a hospital. That (and call centers) is were they could have shined.
> edit: literally never, ever, did anyone need the ability to pull their card out, walk over to another person's desk, and say, "Well hey Jim take a look at this!" and move their session.
Moving between "data center" (next to the office), office and home and taking my session with me, made my work (mostly performance tests then) easier. Never got to yank out someone else's smard-card and session though, as I was the only one using those ;-}