Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

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Feels like the beginning of the end for Citrix.

I've deployed their various products since 1999, back in the NT4 Terminal Server edition. I have fond memories of running MS Word on UNIX terminals at university by connecting to Citrix running on NT4 on my home PC. Other students would walk past rows of screens in the computer lab all showing drab black and white fixed-width text editors except for one in the middle with a colourful WYSIWYG Windows application overlaid on top of the standard UNIX applications.

I would always respond to the queries about how this was working with: "Magic."

Now? Three large customers are winding their Citrix deployments down. Feels like working with Novell products in the early 2000s.

It is not going to be good. The combined company had to pay back $16.5B. Just the interest will be $1B per year.

I remember my dad installing Citrix on our home PC with 28.8 kbps modem in the mid-90s so he could occasionally "telecommute", as working remotely was called back then. It really did seem like magic that he could run all of the Windows apps on his work PC from home.

When I asked people who had already successfully made something work and they gave me replies such as "magic" it really used to frustrate me in the pre-internet days.

Especially in cases like this where they had their better "colourful WYSIWYG Windows application" while the rest of us are stuck on our "drab black and white fixed-width text editors"

It's funny because I had an opposite kind of experience when I was in school in 2001, all the CS students needed to be in the labs to get the full unix experience but my friend and I figured out how to do xwindow forwarding to our windows PCs in the dorm and could work just like we were in the lab.

Citrix ICA was very bandwidth efficient, it would run acceptably over a dialup modem link. Xwindows, not so much.

Reminds me exactly of the old Netware days and their winddown.

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