Cheap hardware X-terms?

[Doug Loss <dloss@csrlink.net>]

I was talking with Roman yesterday when Sun's new Sun Ray system came
up.  Sun Ray is a form of network end station that doesn't run
applications locally but on a server.  For the life of me I can't quite
figure out how it's much different from an X-terminal.  From what I can
see, if a Sun Ray goes bad you should be able to unplug it, plug another
in, and be at pretty much the same spot you were previously.  Roman
tells me that the Sun Rays are stateless, which may mean that you can
resume work where you left off after the situation I described above,
but I don't know that for sure.

I know that some of the folks here have talked and have tried to
implement X-terminals on older hardware as a way to extend the useful
life of existing systems.  We've generally talked about installing Linux
on those systems and setting them up as X-terms.  I was remembering from
my long-ago days as a ComputerLand hardware tech that most ethernet
cards had (and still have) sockets for boot PROMS, which allow them to
be seen by the system as bootable devices.  That would mean that the
system could boot from a boot image file somewhere on the network rather
than from a floppy or harddrive in the machine.  We used to do this from
Novell and IBM networks.

What would it take to develop X-terminal boot PROMs?  If we could do
something like that, any system could be turned into an X-terminal just
by slapping a boot PROM on an ethernet card and installing it.  Any
local harddrive could be reformatted and used as backing store; the
(minimal) OS could come from the network on bootup.  Now that I think
about it, you probably wouldn't even need X-terminal code in the PROM;
that could be part of the stuff loaded to the X-term during
initialization.

I apologize if I've gotten too technical here, but I think there's some
potential here for a _very_ easy way to convert older systems into
X-terms.  Discussion?

-- 
Doug Loss                 The difference between the right word and
Data Network Coordinator  the almost right word is the difference
Bloomsburg University     between lightning and a lightning bug.
dloss@bloomu.edu                Mark Twain