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by icedchai 1044 days ago
NeXT hardware was also massively underpowered, running on 680x0 in the early 90’s when other workstation vendors had moved on to RISC (Sun Sparc, etc.) Sun was actually the Unix leader in the thin client space. All their systems could network boot, mount home directories off NFS, share a common user directory (NIS), etc.
2 comments
microtonal 1044 days ago
But that doesn’t make it a thin client I think? Next to all NeXT applications ran locally.
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threeseed 1044 days ago
NeXT didn't have thin clients because the concept never took off anywhere other than a few niche banking applications.

But it had many of the core pillars e.g. remote home directories, remote/RPC applications. NeXT in particular with frameworks like EOF/PDO pushed for more network centric desktop applications.

It doesn't sound like much today but were pretty new concepts for GUI users.

The reason I mentioned it was that there was talk that the iMac was going to be potentially the first consumer-grade thin client.

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steve1977 1044 days ago
But the Sun UNIX workstations and their thin clients were different lines of devices.

The JavaStation ran JavaOS, not Solaris. Not sure about the Sun Rays.

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icedchai 1044 days ago
Yes, but the thin clients used the same concepts that they pioneered with SunOS / Solaris, like X11. Sun's "thin clients" were mostly just X terminals.
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steve1977 1044 days ago
But the Sun (and NeXT) workstations were not just mostly X terminals, that’s the point I’m trying to make. They were workstations, pretty much the opposite of a thin client.
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icedchai 1044 days ago
Ok. I view "thin" as shades of gray: example a diskless, net-booting Sun is "thinner" than a full blown workstation. Those foundational technologies (like NFS, NIS, X...) made it easier for Sun to build and promote full blown thin clients later on.

To my knowledge, NeXT never supported a diskless config. (Or did they?? Did anyone work with that?)

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detourdog 1044 days ago
Pretty sure diskless was an option for NeXT. Everything was configured in NetInfo where I think a remember a boot file location setting.
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dragonwriter 1042 days ago
The NeXTcube and NeXTstation did not come in diskless configs.

Diskless may have been an option when NeXT software was detached from NeXT hardware, though.

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steve1977 1043 days ago
Ok I see your point. Thin for me is basically dependent on where the actual (bulk of) computation happens.
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