Hacker News Reader

Comment by notbeuller | Hacker News Reader

There was a huge push around that time for Apple to make a thin client style thing. Sun was doing it with java stations and it seemed to be “the buzz” and obvious direction. I don’t think anyone expected a consumer push in response.

View on HN

Steve Jobs was a huge fan of the thin-client model because he had been using it full-time at NeXT.

Could you elaborate? NeXT machines were quite the opposite of thin clients. They were very expensive and had a lot of memory etc. for computers of the early 90ies.

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.

But that doesn’t make it a thin client I think? Next to all NeXT applications ran locally.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?)

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

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.

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.

I did find mention of it in the docs! Perhaps it was supported, they just never shipped systems in that configuration.

It’s also part of the directions for running multiple motherboards in a single cube.

https://wiki.preterhuman.net/NeXTcube_running_68030_and_6804...

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

Did they have big storage though?

I get what you're saying — I'm just remembering Jobs demoing how his NeXT user account was remote and any NeXT machine he sat down on and logged into suddenly became "his" computer.

That's the "thin" client I'm thinking of. But maybe that's just "client".

AFAIK, what Steve had and liked is that his desktop moved with him between at home and at work.

That’s something that thin clients also promise, but doesn’t require using thin clients.

Microsoft Windows Briefcase has enteted the chat.

Its claim to fame was bringing the term Architecture Astronaut into common parlance.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astro...

In retrospect, it's quite funny in light of how webapps and Cloud evolved. As Spolsky predicted in 1998:

"between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can’t think of a single useful thing to build for us"

Man, I normally have some respect for Spolsky's writing, but this one is overly-dismissive crap. Sure, Microsoft really needed to reel in the 13 versions of OneDrive they kept releasing and rereleasing, but that's the only part of the article that aged even remotely well.

"And the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn’t stop him."

Go ahead, try and take away that feature now, see if any customers complain.

I one time saw a talk where they discussed the issue of having to make sure the mouse was in the same location on logout and login for his home slab and later dell laptop.

NeXT rendering engine was display postscript and they had a common set-up of rendering the DPS on a remote computer while logged in over a network. The overall set-up meant that all the data was at headquarters and users could login in from any location and have a local DPS rendering of the centralized user account.

Quite the opposite I’d say…

Reply on news.ycombinator.com