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Comment by mitchell_h | Hacker News Reader

The login cards were the killer feature on them(at the time). I managed a fleet of them things spread all over 4 buildings. Being able to work in one location, get up and goto another and just pickup what you were doing was INSANE in that day and age. Slapping in a keycard do it all was unheard of.

We had citrix and sunray in those days. Citrix was for those that had BIG BIG BIG money and needed windows. We were a java shop, so it was either an e450 in the server room and sunrays, or ultra5s at every desk.

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I never got to use this, but it seems like it would hit my dream computing environment (which has since advanced to an idea that my phone would fill that role so I could be working on my phone, plug my phone into a desktop or laptop workstation, continue working there, unplug, continue on the phone, move to another computer, etc. Apple’s Handoff almost scratches that itch, but it’s not quite as reliable or ubiquitous as I would like and the ideal would be that I have my whole working environment portable via the phone.

I never used it, but Microsoft's Continuum [1], was supposed to scratch that itch too. Your phone could drive a desktop experience when you connected (wired or wireless) to a docking station (I saw a laptop shaped dock which might have been a prototype), and with the proper implementation of UWP apps (which didn't really happen, afaik) you could interact with your apps/data equally in desktop and mobile. Didn't let you run win32 apps though, which makes it kind of limiting, but if all you do is browser, messenger(s), and office suite, it could have worked pretty well. I think this would have worked better with Intel's x86 phone cpus, but those were cancelled days before the Continuum reveal, and Microsoft also did a really poor job on WM10, so nobody knows about any of this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Continuum

The real question is whether the phone is the actual compute, or if it's just the key card that lets you access the remote compute. I think that (provided sufficient connectivity) both of those can be reasonable trade-off options, but they certainly present different views of the world.

Oh man, SunRays and e450s, desktop sessions that ran 24/7 on beefy servers accessible from anywhere, U5s with those type-V membrane keyboards... Every detail of your post makes me warm and fuzzy with nostalgia. :-)

(Except the Citrix. I never admin'ed that, only used it for a few gigs.)

I saw those in use 20 years ago, when physics-class visited the local nuclear-science research center. It felt like Sci-Fi then and I have not yet seen this replicated anywhere else sadly...

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