[steve1977]

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.

[icedchai]

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.

[steve1977]

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.

[icedchai]

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?)

[detourdog]

Pretty sure diskless was an option for NeXT. Everything was configured in NetInfo where I think a remember a boot file location setting.

[dragonwriter]

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.

[detourdog]

I understand that couldn't be purchased without a disk but I kind of remembering booting cubes and slabs from a network file. This was probably 5 years after dropping hardware.

[steve1977]

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