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...

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.

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).

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 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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Everyone in here is nostalgic for Sun Rays.

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.

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.