<story><title>Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber</title><url>https://www.uber.com/blog/devpod-improving-developer-productivity-at-uber/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gandalfgeek</author><text>Back in the early 2000s, Sun (&amp;quot;the network is the computer&amp;quot;) had a similar solution that worked seamlessly for most of their software org-- the Sun Ray. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Sun_Ray&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Sun_Ray&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It was a network terminal. Your files and entire session were on the server. Your “local” terminal consisted only of a network interface and enough compute power to display your session. The way they had it set up was that you could insert your Sun employee ID – the same card used to get into the building – into a slot in the terminal. That authenticated you to the server and displayed your session instantly. Want to show a colleague something you’re working on? Just put your ID into their Sun Ray and show them exactly what you were doing. That was cool! It was a frictionless way to demo and collaborate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>deng</author><text>I worked on a Sun Ray. I and many colleagues absolutely hated it.&lt;p&gt;These tiny machines were just way too slow to handle even the tiny amount of work they had to do. Also, everyone knows that X over network is just not made for modern applications (&amp;quot;modern&amp;quot; in the year 2000!). I worked with Matlab, and had a lot of fun trying to rotate 3D plots with a few thousand points. It was just unbearable.&lt;p&gt;Then of course the &amp;quot;single point of failure&amp;quot; thing. Network problems? No one can work. Main server has a drive failure? No one can work. Main server needs an upgrade? No one can work.&lt;p&gt;The Sun Rays had super-poor USB support. My ergonomic keyboard had no auto-repeat when connected to these things, absolutely impossible to fix or even debug. Then of course there was Sun software: although they invented Java, their JVM was leaking like a sieve and everything Java had to be restarted regularly. The Sun coreutils were just very limited compared to the GNU counterparts. We complained endlessly, and in the end, IT budged and we all got our dedicated Linux machines.</text></comment>
<story><title>Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber</title><url>https://www.uber.com/blog/devpod-improving-developer-productivity-at-uber/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gandalfgeek</author><text>Back in the early 2000s, Sun (&amp;quot;the network is the computer&amp;quot;) had a similar solution that worked seamlessly for most of their software org-- the Sun Ray. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Sun_Ray&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Sun_Ray&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It was a network terminal. Your files and entire session were on the server. Your “local” terminal consisted only of a network interface and enough compute power to display your session. The way they had it set up was that you could insert your Sun employee ID – the same card used to get into the building – into a slot in the terminal. That authenticated you to the server and displayed your session instantly. Want to show a colleague something you’re working on? Just put your ID into their Sun Ray and show them exactly what you were doing. That was cool! It was a frictionless way to demo and collaborate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jimmaswell</author><text>What&amp;#x27;s old is new again. How soon until we realize the X window system actually had some good ideas again and start running desktop apps on cloud servers for remote work?</text></comment>