This is so great to see. I (like many!) have fond memories of Sun Ray. For me (and I suspect for others) Sun Ray will always represent the best of Sun -- and (of course!) some of the company's unrealized potential.
As an aside on Sun Ray, it played a very important (if incidental) role in the development of DTrace in that one of the first truly production systems we used DTrace on was a Sun Ray server inside of Sun that was in a huge amount of pain. (I described this in the DTrace USENIX paper[0], and also in my "Dtrace (sic) Review" talk at Google ca. 2007.[1])
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!
What I remember about them read them being really responsive.
I also really liked the idea of the smart card, more secure than just a password. And you would transfer your entire open session to another terminal with it which was really nice.
I still have one or two SunRays here but the problem is they don't allow for modern resolutions like 1920x1080x8bpp
My first job out of college was at a .edu, and we made good use of SunRays! The session being linked to a smartcard was excellent for popping into a computer lab anywhere on any campus to send an email in the age before smartphones.
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.
When I was in Uni our IT department had rolled out Sun Ray systems and they were actually pretty cool. You'd have a smart card you'd insert into the device which would give you a login page. You'd log in, use your apps. If you had to leave, you pulled the smart card and left. Then you could go to another Sun Ray, maybe in another building, and insert your smart card and your session would pop up with your apps still open, etc.
It was very much like running an X11 server/terminal, except the session could stay open while you moved to another physical terminal. This was great for universities where you might be working on something, have to rush off to class, then could head back to a terminal to pick up where you left off. Also handy if you have long-running tasks that you don't want to interrupt.
Theoretically, given a sufficient networking configuration/VPN/etc., you could pull your smart card out of the Sun Ray in your university office, go home, and then drop your smart card into a Sun Ray at home and still have everything back where you left off.
It was basically the last great innovation of the mainframe/terminal server paradigm, as far as I'm aware. A little late to the party, since by that time most students in CS had laptops and the rest used computers at home, but still very cool.
We had this at a job I had many years ago. We had a Sun Niagara system with some Sun Rays attached, and I had a Sun Ray laptop at home, on the other side of the world. Office in London, home in Melbourne. It wasn't even that slow.
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.
The thing that Sun Ray added was the ability to move to a new physical terminal without logging out of your existing session, closing your apps, reopening them, picking up where you left off, etc. Could see it being great for e.g. university professors who have to leave halfway through grading a paper and didn't want to lose their place, or a long-running process that you didn't (or couldn't) put in a screen or tmux session.
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 VMS influence is also why DOS and NT used / for options rather than - like Unix. I was a big fan of the CLD method of defining commands. It provided a nice standardized way of parsing command line arguments that was going to be consistent between all applications.
DOS uses / because programs written for CP/M, and which were subsequently ported to MS-DOS, used forward slashes.
when PC/MS-DOS 2.0 was released, with support for directories, it supported both forward and backward slashes for directory separator because Microsoft programmers wanted to use forward slashes (bringing them over from Xenix, including adding virtual "DEV" directory with device files), but for compatibility and user friendliness the default was \ for directories and / for options
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.
It’s an awesome looking machine even if it’s a bit dated for some people’s tastes. Any way the wind blows, it’s massively preferable to today’s largely soulless designs.
I should buy a SunRay and 3D scan it. They're still around, and These shapes should not be that hard to 3D print (does any filament maker out there color match that beautiful Sun Microsystems purple?), and this would make an amazing case for an SBC. And scaling it up for mini-ITX would be friggin hilarious too.
I worked for a meat works that had Sunrays on all the corporate desktops and the IT manager (in a department of 3 supporting a billion dollar business) made the decision to move Sunrays off the clunky Solaris 10 CDE onto... Ubuntu Dapper Drake. My predecessor had worked out how to get all the bits running and we had Ubuntu on Sunray!
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.
So many good memories. My "year in industry" was watchmoor park in the UK, first 3 months spent running around sun's fancy new offices replacing all the burnt out Sunrays.
Still think they've not been matched for ease of "start a session, walk away, carry on somewhere else" as if you've never left your desk.
Tangentially related, if anyone has Sun nostalgia but only a bit, find a Sun Type 6 USB keyboard on eBay and plug it in. Great keyboard for a Mac. Unfortunately, the left-hand function keys (Stop, Again, Props, etc.) do not emit any usable keycodes. But everything else works.
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.
The real question is whether the phone is the actual compute, or if it's just the key card that lets you access the remote compute. I think that (provided sufficient connectivity) both of those can be reasonable trade-off options, but they certainly present different views of the world.
I never used it, but Microsoft's Continuum [1], was supposed to scratch that itch too. Your phone could drive a desktop experience when you connected (wired or wireless) to a docking station (I saw a laptop shaped dock which might have been a prototype), and with the proper implementation of UWP apps (which didn't really happen, afaik) you could interact with your apps/data equally in desktop and mobile. Didn't let you run win32 apps though, which makes it kind of limiting, but if all you do is browser, messenger(s), and office suite, it could have worked pretty well. I think this would have worked better with Intel's x86 phone cpus, but those were cancelled days before the Continuum reveal, and Microsoft also did a really poor job on WM10, so nobody knows about any of this.
I saw those in use 20 years ago, when physics-class visited the local nuclear-science research center. It felt like Sci-Fi then and I have not yet seen this replicated anywhere else sadly...
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.)
This is so great to see. I (like many!) have fond memories of Sun Ray. For me (and I suspect for others) Sun Ray will always represent the best of Sun -- and (of course!) some of the company's unrealized potential.
As an aside on Sun Ray, it played a very important (if incidental) role in the development of DTrace in that one of the first truly production systems we used DTrace on was a Sun Ray server inside of Sun that was in a huge amount of pain. (I described this in the DTrace USENIX paper[0], and also in my "Dtrace (sic) Review" talk at Google ca. 2007.[1])
[0] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgmA48fILq8
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!
What I remember about them read them being really responsive.
I also really liked the idea of the smart card, more secure than just a password. And you would transfer your entire open session to another terminal with it which was really nice.
I still have one or two SunRays here but the problem is they don't allow for modern resolutions like 1920x1080x8bpp
My first job out of college was at a .edu, and we made good use of SunRays! The session being linked to a smartcard was excellent for popping into a computer lab anywhere on any campus to send an email in the age before smartphones.
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.
When I was in Uni our IT department had rolled out Sun Ray systems and they were actually pretty cool. You'd have a smart card you'd insert into the device which would give you a login page. You'd log in, use your apps. If you had to leave, you pulled the smart card and left. Then you could go to another Sun Ray, maybe in another building, and insert your smart card and your session would pop up with your apps still open, etc.
It was very much like running an X11 server/terminal, except the session could stay open while you moved to another physical terminal. This was great for universities where you might be working on something, have to rush off to class, then could head back to a terminal to pick up where you left off. Also handy if you have long-running tasks that you don't want to interrupt.
Theoretically, given a sufficient networking configuration/VPN/etc., you could pull your smart card out of the Sun Ray in your university office, go home, and then drop your smart card into a Sun Ray at home and still have everything back where you left off.
It was basically the last great innovation of the mainframe/terminal server paradigm, as far as I'm aware. A little late to the party, since by that time most students in CS had laptops and the rest used computers at home, but still very cool.
We had this at a job I had many years ago. We had a Sun Niagara system with some Sun Rays attached, and I had a Sun Ray laptop at home, on the other side of the world. Office in London, home in Melbourne. It wasn't even that slow.
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.
I got yelled at for running xeyes on a 5 metre video wall. Couldn't resist.
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).
The thing that Sun Ray added was the ability to move to a new physical terminal without logging out of your existing session, closing your apps, reopening them, picking up where you left off, etc. Could see it being great for e.g. university professors who have to leave halfway through grading a paper and didn't want to lose their place, or a long-running process that you didn't (or couldn't) put in a screen or tmux session.
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 VMS influence is also why DOS and NT used / for options rather than - like Unix. I was a big fan of the CLD method of defining commands. It provided a nice standardized way of parsing command line arguments that was going to be consistent between all applications.
DOS uses / because programs written for CP/M, and which were subsequently ported to MS-DOS, used forward slashes.
when PC/MS-DOS 2.0 was released, with support for directories, it supported both forward and backward slashes for directory separator because Microsoft programmers wanted to use forward slashes (bringing them over from Xenix, including adding virtual "DEV" directory with device files), but for compatibility and user friendliness the default was \ for directories and / for options
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!
It’s an awesome looking machine even if it’s a bit dated for some people’s tastes. Any way the wind blows, it’s massively preferable to today’s largely soulless designs.
Taste is subjective after all. I'd say it has a certain late 90s charm to it.
Indeed it is subjective, I think the "Krups" was beautiful.
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 should buy a SunRay and 3D scan it. They're still around, and These shapes should not be that hard to 3D print (does any filament maker out there color match that beautiful Sun Microsystems purple?), and this would make an amazing case for an SBC. And scaling it up for mini-ITX would be friggin hilarious too.
This post takes me back to 2006.
I worked for a meat works that had Sunrays on all the corporate desktops and the IT manager (in a department of 3 supporting a billion dollar business) made the decision to move Sunrays off the clunky Solaris 10 CDE onto... Ubuntu Dapper Drake. My predecessor had worked out how to get all the bits running and we had Ubuntu on Sunray!
Ref: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuOnSunRay
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.
edit: apparently xrandr calls this "panning"
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.
So many good memories. My "year in industry" was watchmoor park in the UK, first 3 months spent running around sun's fancy new offices replacing all the burnt out Sunrays.
Still think they've not been matched for ease of "start a session, walk away, carry on somewhere else" as if you've never left your desk.
Ah OpenSolaris, good to see you survived, but oh boy it aches my heart every time I hear your name. Just like ZFS
Tangentially related, if anyone has Sun nostalgia but only a bit, find a Sun Type 6 USB keyboard on eBay and plug it in. Great keyboard for a Mac. Unfortunately, the left-hand function keys (Stop, Again, Props, etc.) do not emit any usable keycodes. But everything else works.
Sun Rays were so awesome. Smart cards for authentication and sessions. Options for fiber directly to them. Great tech that died with Sun.
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 :)
heh, glad to hear it :)
plz do novell netware next lol
someday, someday. definitely on the list.
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.
The real question is whether the phone is the actual compute, or if it's just the key card that lets you access the remote compute. I think that (provided sufficient connectivity) both of those can be reasonable trade-off options, but they certainly present different views of the world.
I never used it, but Microsoft's Continuum [1], was supposed to scratch that itch too. Your phone could drive a desktop experience when you connected (wired or wireless) to a docking station (I saw a laptop shaped dock which might have been a prototype), and with the proper implementation of UWP apps (which didn't really happen, afaik) you could interact with your apps/data equally in desktop and mobile. Didn't let you run win32 apps though, which makes it kind of limiting, but if all you do is browser, messenger(s), and office suite, it could have worked pretty well. I think this would have worked better with Intel's x86 phone cpus, but those were cancelled days before the Continuum reveal, and Microsoft also did a really poor job on WM10, so nobody knows about any of this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Continuum
I saw those in use 20 years ago, when physics-class visited the local nuclear-science research center. It felt like Sci-Fi then and I have not yet seen this replicated anywhere else sadly...
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.)