Amazon's Thin Client for business is an IT department's dream

How is this different from the Sunray, which had central compute power, persistent and portable sessions and user identification via smart cards?

Old ideas come around. Most installations were on a LAN, though the goal was probably for WAN, give or take network speeds.

I don't know enough about cloud computing, especially Amazon's version, to say, but sun rays are apparently collector's items with no support, except legacy or home brew software. It is/was more frame buffering than VNC, or X.

Corrections are welcome, as it was a very long time ago.