Long before Oracle killed it, Sun fumbled it, sadly. The failure of SunRay to live up to its potential -- and it clearly had tremendous potential -- was Sun at its most frustrating: the company tended to became disinterested in things at exactly the moment that really called for focus.
As a concrete example, the failure to add USB printing support killed SunRay at airline kiosks in the early 2000s. American Airlines was the first airline to adopt kiosk-based check-in; they were very hot on SunRay, but needed USB printing. When American found out that Sun had just gutted the team (including everyone responsible for USB support!), they (reluctantly!) used Windows-based PCs instead. Sun tried to put the group back together, but it was too late -- and every airline followed American's lead.
Could/would SunRay have been used for airline kiosks? There are reasons to believe that it would have -- and it was certainly a better technical fit than an entire Windows PC.
There were examples like this all over the place, not just with SunRay but at Sun more broadly; despite the terrific building blocks, Sun often lacked the patience and focus to add the polish needed for a real product. (Our frustration with Sun in this regard led us to start Fishworks in 2006.[0])
What would USB printing on a SunRay look like? Even in general, how do thin clients work with accessories and the like? It does feel like there's some tension between "this USB device is plugged directly into a computer" and "the computer is not 'the' computer"?
Seems like a tricky problem but clearly at least some of it was solved given USB ports were on the machine
What's tricky about it? You can use USB over IP on Linux in the real world today, so I can't see any reason why you couldn't pass devices from the thin client to the server in the same way. The only slight oddity is that you would pretend that it was a USB hub that got plugged and unplugged whenever the session connected and disconnected.
Well GP mentioned that there _wasn't_ USB printing support, right? If USB over IP "just worked" and the sunray had USB over IP support then there's USB printing support right?
But I just realized the "USB printing support" stuff was maybe less about USB printers themselves and more about being able to have, say, 30 thin clients with 30 different printers hooked up but the application would know which printer was the right one (instead of showing 30 printers available, for example)
Oracle did try to monetize SunRay but for whatever reason it didn't meet their profit threshold. It was fantastic technology and I'm almost certain I still have the dual monitor variation in my basement somewhere.
The point behind SunRay was to give organizations 100% control, not 99.9%, 100% over everything any of their computers were used for, like a mainframe. Of course, this made them 99.9% unusable. Because they sucked at what they were meant for, not because of Sun, but because of cheapass management under provisioning the mainframes, and they just couldn't do anything else. This meant they were unable-to-scroll-one-page-down-in-a-list-in-a-minute level of unusable in practice.
Occasionally you'd find one where the security was about as well executed as the function they were meant for and there was some fun to be had, but not much.
I find it hard to have much sympathy for SunRay. Their advantages were supposed to be price, but they were never cheap, and security, but that required hiring engineers that understand mainframe unix security, which management just didn't do.
As a concrete example, the failure to add USB printing support killed SunRay at airline kiosks in the early 2000s. American Airlines was the first airline to adopt kiosk-based check-in; they were very hot on SunRay, but needed USB printing. When American found out that Sun had just gutted the team (including everyone responsible for USB support!), they (reluctantly!) used Windows-based PCs instead. Sun tried to put the group back together, but it was too late -- and every airline followed American's lead.
Could/would SunRay have been used for airline kiosks? There are reasons to believe that it would have -- and it was certainly a better technical fit than an entire Windows PC.
There were examples like this all over the place, not just with SunRay but at Sun more broadly; despite the terrific building blocks, Sun often lacked the patience and focus to add the polish needed for a real product. (Our frustration with Sun in this regard led us to start Fishworks in 2006.[0])
RIP SunRay -- and what could have been!
[0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2008/11/10/fishworks-now-it-can...