The computer designed to only run Java Applets - Sun JavaStation
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- Опубликовано: 4 окт 2024
- In this video we take a look at the Sun JavaStation - A Network Computer released by Sun Microsystems in 1996 designed purely to run Java Applets. We will take a look at the hardware, take it apart to see what's inside then boot it up and take a look at JavaOS!
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We have these at my work for calibration of some med tech equipment and I am still making code changes to the apps that we use. The software is Java based and it communicates over rs232 with the calibration device. It is on and used pretty much 24/7. That being said, we have 5 spare but we've only had one fail over the past 10 years, and that was a power supply. As much as I detest Java development, these things are built like a brick shit house!
What version of Java are/were you stuck on?
Sun hardware was great
@@RonJohn63 consdier that these were run JavaOS which was discontinued in 1999... anyway can't direct link on youtube but josref-150072.pdf in a google search should result in the technical document describing the later version of JavaOS. It predates Java ME. Probably the closest modern equivalent would be Genode OS.
🎉🎉🎉
@@Wingnut353I'll check it out
When I get frustrated with my own IT-related problems, I think of videos like this one, remember how things used to be, and suddenly it doesn't seem so bad.
A whole OS just to run Java, it's fascinating. You are correct, it is an early Chromebook but was probably never popular, due to it being too slow.
jamie marchant to me it shows how few ideas of Googles are orginal.
I think a lot of ideas are thought of by more than one person but only one person usually has the resources to bring them to market.
well it wasn’t popular cuz it wasn’t marketed to consumers
Google just tries to push chromebooks to the market. Sun probably did the same with "a stupid idea but a huge budget" motto
I had one of the first all-touchscreen smartphones (just before iPhone 1 came out) -- It was also completely JAVA based.
I was a technical manager at Sun in 1996, the person whose team of System Administrators helped IT roll out 3000 of the original Sun Javastations throughout Sun (we ate our own dogfood, as Scott used to say). As this video points out, Sun’s Javastation was a microSparc and essentially PXE booted the JavaOS. One company we worked with had it to PXE boot Solaris, but even though it ran faster, that was not politically correct at a time Java was set to take over the world, and the idea was canned. Because this was before JIT, it was a dog slow machine and didn’t gain a lot of traction with our employees. It also didn’t help that our internal application development teams were reluctant to port their apps to Java. So, slow machine with no apps…most people wound up using it to hang Post-it notes…no joke. It wasn’t a bad idea, but in the beginning days of Java, it was a risky thing to do. Someone at Sun developed a true Java hardware machine. I thought that would have been a better choice than a JVM without JIT, but it never got the backing to take off.
The second generation networked computer was a graphics card with edge electronics to handle a mouse, keyboard and a card reader. It was faster, since all processing was done in the building’s servers. Think of it as an X-windows server. You would plug in your access card, log in, and run whatever application’s you wanted. You could pull your card out, go to another networked computer, plug the card in, and voila, your session was moved there, just as you’d left it. That was pretty slick.
Do you think a modified JavaOS or replacement OS could run on these machines with a JIT? Obviously you can’t go too modern because of the deprecation of applets, but maybe you could hack together some Frankenstein JVM with a new JIT and old applet support
Perhaps
"Someone at Sun developed a true Java hardware machine. I thought that would have been a better choice than a JVM without JIT, but it never got the backing to take off."
I think I remember hearing about this. I read about a computer Sun was working on that would run JavaOS, and I thought the article said the machine would run bytecode natively. I have a memory of keeping track of this, and finding that Sun didn't release it.
I agree. I think this would've been a better approach.
Interesting that they decided instead to go with the JavaStation, using an early operating model later used by the Chromebook.
Something I read many years ago was that Sun was trying to use Java to sell Sun workstations, since Sun's marketing was saying that Java had better performance on them than on other platforms. Perhaps this concept ran into the buzz saw of trying to upsell Sun workstations (Sparc, etc.).
In MTV7 we mostly just took the keyboards and mice home, copped the RAM for our PCs, and used the boxes as doorstops. Was nice to get the 3k bonus for the effort though! :)
I miss Sun, they had some classy hardware, I remember walking into data centres at night in the early 2000's and the room lit purely from the glow of the illuminated Sun logos.
We should create Sun-based single board computer project compatible with those old machines
Yeah, they tried to go full proprietory and lost the ball. Also java applets were bad.
@@udittlambajqva applets werent great but irs more their web embedability was a huge risk, like activeX. Its not like javas competitors at the time were much better, even early flash and shockwave on the web. For the time really at a high level conceptual level theres not much wrong with applets given the era
@@udittlambaswing UI was ugly as hell tho ill guve you that
@@lainwired3946 i see, thanks for the reply
It's important to consider that Windows 95 was still new and shiny at the time. What nobody knew at the time was that Java was indeed going to be very popular - but on the back-end.
And modern Java back end programming is pretty nice, all things considered. It's never going to be super nice because well, you're the backend, you have to integrate 400 different retarded services, acquiesce to 14 different architectural trends that lets us scale to google levels so all our 100 concurrent users can feel the fury and speed of a fully operational battle stat... backend service, etc. but it's rarely the language that makes me want to paint myself with goat blood, run naked into a large government building and educate people about Ted's musings on the industrial revolution and its consequences for the modern society.
@@HrHaakonmost epic reply of all time
At least in the world of academia it felt like every few years Sun kept on coming up with yet another form of diskless thin-client stuff that my university’s IT staff kept on buying into, thinking that THIS TIME it’ll work.
It never did.
Well what usually happens is that the management buys into it and then demands the actual IT technically competent staff support and implement it, even while the tech staff are desperately trying to tell them that it is a bad, bad idea.
Can confirm from experience that this is exactly what happens in many Governments.
we have a hospital that uses diskless Thin-machines that only boot when connected to a hospital server it seems to work ok
Yeah it really depends on a lot of factors. Simply being a thin client isn't necessarily bad (especially if you have enough RAM and network bandwidth and a reasonably light set of software to run), it's just that Sun kept on trying to do *too much* with them all at once, and it was always a disaster, even outside of their Java marketing push. Like the SunRay system came along with them also pushing CDE really hard, and that required way more resources than the poor little things could handle.
The only sun diskless setups that worked well were the sun ray terminals 2nd gen and up. Those were actually really nice.
Thanks for the video Cameron, I just found it 4 years later. My first job was working at Corel on Office for Java, we started writing it in 1995 with the Java beta SDK, I was there for the Beans version that was released on JDK 1.1. I don't remember it being that slow back in the day, it was cutting edge in 1996. I was 20'ish and I had SPARCstation IPC's and IPX's on my desk, to run our prerelease JavaStations from, it was cool work. With a 20xx lens it looks like a crappy project, but it was fun inventing things at the time.
I remember Corel’s plan to rewrite their entire office suite in Java. That turned out to be a disaster.
This brings back some memories. In 1996, I spent a short time as a contractor at Sun Microsystems in Menlo Park, California, helping to deploy a few hundred of these to internal users at Sun. The goal was to be able to say “see, we use our own technology, that proves the JavaStation is viable technology.” The performance didn’t seem as bad back then as it does now, because everything was much slower back then, of course. (The SPARCstation 20 I had on my desk at Sun seemed blazingly fast at the time, but it pales in comparison to the iPad Pro I’m writing this comment on.) As I recall, the network server we were using to boot/serve that lot of JavaStations was a Sun Ultra Enterprise 4000 (or maybe two of them?).
It was around that time that Sun started rolling out the first version of their JIT compiler, so the Java developers were having to address real performance concerns at the time. Things got a lot less painful after that though. I still don’t know how much I’d rely on one of these outside of a very limited use-case (like an information kiosk, as stated in the video). I think they’d be really useful for that sort of thing though.
What a hideous idea of a machine! I love it :) April 2/19118 ? Nice Y2K problem there?
haha, wow, never noticed that one!
Wasn't this designed in 1996? Wow.
Interesting that the calendar displayed 2018 correctly
Catch it at the wrong point in the year and it will be an hour off because of politicians fiddling with DST.
Consider that the code that displayed the date as "19118" was written within a decade of y2k, if not within a handful of years.
It's odd how java used to be this thing that lets you run code on your computer itself and bypass the browser, and it actually feel like you're controlling your computer from your web browser and not a canned experience that requires you to accept it into the web browser.
JavaOS kinda feels like ChromeOS in a way, but in different generations.
And now everyone is building more and more ways to make javascript do the same shit because OMG JAVA IS TEH SECURITY HOLE *coughcoug**www.owasp.org/index.php/XSS_Filter_Evasion_Cheat_Sheet* while also not being javascript.
This timeline is ridiculous.
Letting websites execute code outside of the browser is a dangerous thing to do from a security standpoint. That's part of the reason both Java and Adobe Flash have been mostly replaced by JavaScript + HTML5 running sandboxed within the browser.
But Java applets are really just one use for Java. Nowadays it's still common to see Java in use on the server end.
Indeed, but I’d prefer working with Java any day of the week
@@TimurTripp2 fast forward 4 years later Java is being exterminated everywhere 😳😤
Web assembly is if Java was good
Then they pivoted and now we have Keurig. The appliance designed only to make Java from capsules. Awesome video as usual dude! As a wise man once said, "Don't stop, believing[...]"
Ya,wot did you do,join tje q an eat em for peace hippy can system sick kill liz,dog tars?
Google Translating Swahili to English still hasn't seemed to have caught up with the other languages.
I remember my university had kiosks with these in them all over the place. They were used for things like enrollment, staff directory, checking email, printing out transcripts, etc.
Some video make me feel a million years old... :) I remember going to Sun's Linlithgow offices when they launched this in 96 and were pushing Java as the solution for all the world's ills. It was just slidewear at that point and seemed to me a bit like a rehashed X terminal (which it seems to be). Still have my Duke pin badge somewhere!
Not sure I'd describe the network protocols as particularly out dated. Only RARP is unlikely to be found on a office LAN these days.
it's worse than a X terminal, since it needs to [sluggishly] download the os and apps, while the X terminal got window drawing instructions from a remote machine
Well, the world still mostly uses Java, just not in that sense...
But can it run Minecraft: Java Edition?
I was thinking the exact same thing XD
The perfect Runescape and Minecraft machine.
It probably requires a newer version of the Java runtime.
Modern Java runtime and native libararies that Minecraft uses must be ported in order to run.
it has 32MB of ram and i could barely run Minecraft at 256MB of ram so increase the ram and import newer java runtime and there you go!!!!
That "old fashioned Java logo" on the login screen is called Duke. Hopefully he's not too offended! Great video. I always appreciated Sun for their industrial design.
When I went for Sun training in NYC during the late 90's you used one of these to sign in for class. The machines in the classrooms themselves were Ultra 10's.
Only around 15 years ahead of its time. I suppose the benefit of modern web apps is that the rendering of the HTML and running of the JS is done largely in the native OS and browser, rather than in a virtual machine. There were such high hopes for Java Applets on the web but it wasn't to be.
Back then IE set the standards. Websites were starting not to work with Netscape and all organizations wanted to let Microsoft tell them which standards and software to buy as PHB boss types loved standards back then. Today Chrome sets the standards and is cutting edge. Cascade styling sheets and javascript were not supported in hotjava if I recall which by 2000 started to become all the rave with dynamic HTML.
I was 7 in in 1996. I am glad youtube exists for us to learn and experience what we were unable to do or comprehend at the time.
It is forgotten that many ARM cores have Jazelle extensions that can run JVM instructions natively but Android does not use them when it shows how much quicker Dalvik is
Natively executing JVM sounds like a terrible idea given the need for GC and how high level the function signatures are
@@harrytsang1501 The JVM itself has a fairly primitive computational model.
Very nice little system, I wonder if it can play a Java port of Doom :P
Like mochadoom? Nope, it doesn't work.
TheLonerD that's a real pitty , would have been a fun demonstration and turned the system into something fun
Well, not a Java port, but one can boot NetBSD and compile DOOM for the SPARC ISA - which I have indeed done with a SPARCstation 5 and can confirm that it works!
Just make sure to have around 64MB or more for compiling to not dip into SWAP space. :)
wow, you have turned a sparcstation into something useful? I so wish i can do that with my Alpha's...
I'm pretty sure you could - NetBSD works on just about any architecture, including DEC Alpha, and DOOM can be compiled and built for it as well.
If I had a DEC Alpha system, I totally would do that!
You could set up an arduino to listen on the serial console, detect the boot error message, and send the config strings. This would let you use it comfortably while keeping your nvram IC pristine. Careful with ttl-rs232 conversion!
I’m pretty certain that the NVRAM can just be replaced
@@0xbenediktyeah. I was thinking you could use a much smaller chip nowadays that’s actually non volatile without a battery, and then put it on a PCB that adapts it to the socket for the original NVRAM.
You might want to look up the original specs of the chip to see what kind of write endurance it expected, but it’s entirely possible you’ll get a lot more of that from a random off the shelf chip
This is a dallas integrated battery problem. The solution i simple You have to buy new nvram or mod old by attaching aditional battery witch bracket but you hawe to destroy a litle bit the nvram cover because it is a battery inside and no battery pins are out of the battery chip avalible.
@@0xbenediktYes it can be replaced it have socket and bracket witch helps witch easy remove.
We should never forget how ahead of the curve Sun Microsystems were.
Considering their tagline was "the network is the computer" before most people had any Internet access, they sure were ahead of the curve in that respect :)
Goes to show how being too early also negatively predicts success.
Agree. Could have taken the place that Apple has now and more
coobird's lab if they had committed to Solaris x86, which was a solid OS with great support, they could have had a serious competitor to Linux. But their salesorgs ran the show, and insisted on pushing expensive, slow SPARC systems. That meant Solaris x86 was seen as a threat internally. It's a huge shame.
They have been doing bloatware way before it became the norm.
I remember these. The company I was working for in the late 90s was working on delivering "Network Computing" services, the start of the "cloud". These Sun boxes were very expensive, though, compared to X-terminals that started coming with Netscape and reasonably fast JVMs built-in, like the Neoware @workstations we ended up going with.
The LT1237 is a RS232 transceiver, which is likely dedicated to the serial port, however, it is probably then communicating back with the Super I/o chip as well.
09-2023 First time it pops in my reccomended videos... Interesting piece of haraware Thanks for sharing.
I've been looking for this video for 10 years! Thanks for creating this video 😂
13:39 RARP, tftp and dhcp are how X-terminals booted Back In The Day.
I could see this sort of thing being super useful for specific things back in the 90s
I am amazed you even found the software. I have the Fox (the prototype), the Mr Coffee and the Krupps. While the Fox runs basic Solaris, the other two needs JavaOS.
Wow, the amount of effort required to get that machine running is just amazing. Well done!
This is pretty ahead of it's time. This is effectively what software as a service is now.
Once Again Sun being Garbage ahead of its time.
Not really. More like a thin client.
basically a chromebook
explain, how is this software as a service? It's a piece of hardware with an OS which only runs jvm's
Isn't that basicly what Android is?
Lucent’s Inferno OS was ported to this hardware and the performance impressed folks at the Sun conference where this was introduced.
I'd bet at its core it's running a Solaris 2.5 kernel and a base openwin. The guts are basically a sparcstation 4 with a cg3 or tcx framebuffer it looks like.
stonent Sad to see how even on bleeding edge revolutionary tech, they still hamstrung their own efforts by tying them to their old, slow hardware platforms.
Its a sun dried raspberrypi?
Unfortunately Arm and Sparc are 2 different things...
No, I remember JavaOS was always advertised as its own thing. There’s no UNIX kernel in there, and Sun even wrote device drivers in Java. You can tell that they recycled the same FORTH-based OpenBoot from the commands he types to reset the MAC address, but JavaOS was just an interpreted JVM on top of that. No X11. No OSF/Motif. No Openwin.
@@JakeHambyZ80 You are correct. No Sun OS under the hood. Almost all Java code. I saw the source code to it back in 96 or 97.
Hi Cameron. Thanks for the video! I remember when these came out, and I couldn't believe people bought them at the time. A tiny computer stuffed in an old disk/tape drive box? Ridiculous! As usual though, Sun was ahead of its time, and hampered by internal politics that prevented their product from reaching its full potential.
I was a little confused to hear you say the JS required "outdated protocols" to boot- modern intel systems frequently PXE boot nearly the exact same way! It's only very recently that some netbooting has started using http to transfer the bulk of the OS boot image.
Thanks! I should have probably been more specific when I mentioned the network protocols, I was mostly referring to RARP and the fact that it only supports NFSv2
I did use a Java based office suite in the late 90s .. (which i thought was cool in our new library at the university) but it was a third party product, not Corel. It was actually pretty responsive on a normal PC. I doubt the company is still around these days.
It's mind-boggling that they didn't even ship this thing with a bit of local storage for caching purposes. That office suite would boot up so much quicker.
The reason was so the user's desktop was available to any Javastation you logged into. Later versions used a card for logging in.
Neat, something from a time period where Java actually mattered and wasn't being used as a pawn for frivolous lawsuits. Great video!
Java is still very important and widely used. Just not in desktop applications. But all android apps are Java apps and a lot of server applications are Java.
Looking at the date on that thing shows that it is not Y2K compliant.
Yes this is way ahead of it's time
The java logo on the top looks great.
I'd be *very* tempted to program that serial config into an Arduino, (probably mini / nano) soldered to a F/DB8 that I could just _leave_ plugged into the serial console.
I remember the press about them at the time. They were marketed _hard,_ but never particularly popular, despite that. I think people seemed to feel this was a mainframe company, still trying to reverse the trend towards micro-computers, and back to a centralized mainframe server system. Most of us felt that that model suits computer manufacturers, while micro-computers suited users, and businesses better.
The only partially successful attempt to make that work that I ever saw, was the SiliconGraphics Spark Stations for Render Farms. Even then, the Amiga based Raptor servers over took them _fairly_ quickly. (and Linux servers, not long after that)
As a programmer who's been writing Java for many years, I've never known that there's an entire operating system built in Java. Thanks for the amazing video!
Nice work! Sun hardware is an absolute nightmare so getting this booted is quite a feat.
I had a chance to use that workstation about 20 years ago on SUN presentation for my school. It was "the future" back then and it looked like it.
At certain computing museum we used the sort-of-successor to the JavaStation, the Sun Ray (geddit?), that was more or less an updated version but was even more barebones. From memory you had a choice of remote desktop clients - VNC, Microsoft Terminal Services (Remote Desktop) and Sun's own proprietary protocol. They were a pain to get working but once they did they generally kept going. Been a while since I've been there - but I think it might still be running the signage and an exhibit!
As for the HP switches - check that they aren't the models which have an SSH CLI, disabled by default. Found that they made the switches actually manageable, and the CLI is more or less the same even on the newer Aruba-branded switches.
It reminds me of Acorn NC device with it's special NC version of RISC OS where they didn't bother putting alot of modules in ROM so it had to start !Boot (with all those missing modules) from the network!
underrated video.
I like that heatsink, very cool. (Pun not intended)
I think it's funny how this is designed to be a diskless thin client, but it's made in a disk drive enclosure.
Kudos to you for getting this working! This was very cool to actually see in action.
Other manufacturers jumped on that bandwagon after Sun, including IBM and Apple. NCs were a neat idea, quite forward-thinking, but they obviously never caught on. Not too long ago I found a back issue of a French magazine from 1997 that featured a big section on Java computing, and how it could put Windows in peril.
Not that obvious, I'd say... look at a Chromebox -- it's pretty much this concept
azz666 Very much so. The main difference is that current technology has mostly solved the sluggishness problem.
Lassi Kinnunen In my opinion this is much closer to a Chrome OS device than to an Android device in terms of concept. The core idea behind these devices was that they would only include a web browser and an execution environment to run what we would call today SaaS apps through said browser, without relying on local storage at all. It really isn't much different to a Chromebook, which is meant to load Google apps through Chrome, and save everything to the cloud. The main difference is that NCs would use Java applets for all the client side code, whereas Chrome would run some Javascript on V8. On the other hand, the idea behind Android initially was to be able to load and run apps saved locally - although nowadays you do have the possibility to prompt users to "install" web apps to a device, which basically will open a full screen web view.
Chromebooks are made to run apps locally (Chrome apps store) and require a storage device that holds much more than just the OS. Chromebooks are also capable of doing file management.
What chromeOS really is: a OS with a browser as it's shell.
Nice Video abd great little piece of history. I just got hold of an IBM 8363 Netvista Thin client which had a variety of Os's for them but also was at a time when Java applets were really pushed.
Sun was always light years ahead of time - like in their ZFS supporting very huge disks not even filled today - but they sadly could not really sell all their knowledge and technology in a long term profitable way to stay in business like a Microsoft
I had a couple of both major versions of JavaStation which I had running Linux as xterms, essentially newer versions of the lovely old SLC/ELC machines. At one point I picked up a Sun Ray to try and do the same, but by the time those were reverse engineered to be usable they were long obsolete.
There was an earlier design that smaller form factor, and had, as I recall, a circular recessed area in the top, suitable for setting a coffee cup on. So far I have not found pictures of it; there weren't many made, and they were largely internal to Sun.
Interesting machine, it's UI looks so dull and uninspiring though and being so slow the user must have got very depressed using it!
Thanks for sharing this. That was some nice troubleshooting to setup the server.
Hey! Love your videos! I've watched a few of them, and I impressed by the way you present the computer systems and software, and the knowledge you have about them is absolutely impeccable! Keep making more videos, you've got one loyal fan here 😊
Now I'm feeling tempted to fire up the successor to these, the SunRay. Somehow I ended up with a few of the first and second generation of them. The software however is always a pain because of oracle.
Ahh yeah, I have a SunRay 1, need to try and get it going at some point!
Those grey pages with beveled buttons are just precious 90s web. I love that it uses web views for status monitoring, java in html in java :)
Great video. It triggered a memory for me - I remember seeing those coffee cups on computers when I was in first or second grade (which would have been '93 or '94)
Great video Cameron. I really enjoy your videos of systems like this. Thank you.
how we at sun developed things that were ahead of the time, where there was not really a need in the market, which mostly came years later. remember the 3U 12 blade chassis with built in switch, the sunray, the magnum and nano-magnum switch.. etc loved working for Sun at the time, learned a lot, which I still use in my daily work :)
15:14 that IBM PS/1 model M2 is a rarity and a little gem of its own.
PSU's 2 pin connector is probably for a fan. Modern PSUs power their own fans, but some (PSUs older than/not supporting P4 spec, generally) ran the fan off the motherboard instead, via a cable. Sometimes it's just 1 pin for the 3 pin PWM headers, just so the fan shows up as a case fan in the PC's UEFI/BIOS so you can check it's speed (or any other tool that can check the same information). As for why, I haven't a clue why this system uses a loop back cable for a fan instead of taking it off the power supply.
Considering that these machines, and Corel Office For Java, were built in the days of Java version 1, it's amazing the apps ran at all. This was very early days.
Pretty disappointed. By the name JavaStation I would have expected that it has a special hardware CPU that can execute Java bytecode directly, not a JVM over another kind of CPU. I never was a Java fan though...
Sun's first dedicated Java processor, the PicoJava I, was announced in November of 1996 so it was too late for this machine. And it was too late in general since the idea of a Net PC crashed (Corel dropped its Java office apps for Linux and Acorn bet the company on the concept and lost) so Sun never built a product with the new chip.
Exactly what I thought, it's not that Bytecode-capable CPU's don't exist...
Thumb'd up when I saw the wireshark cap
This was an awesome video on this obscure computer system, good job dude!
This was actually a proof-of-concept system that turned out quite well for Java in the long run. Java became ubiquitous on appliances and provides a platform for millions of them, even before IoT was a "thing".
My Samsung Blu-ray player, vintage 2010, runs Pure Java, as its badge indicates. Look around and I imagine you'd find it all over the place.
The reason bluray players run Java Is the because all the menus are written in it, for some reason
Even my car keys (well, RFID keycards) run Java (Java Card OS)
Three Billion Devices, in fact!
I promise your Blu-ray player runs not just Java. The firmware kernel, drivers, JVM, crypto libraries, would all be C / C++.
@@Toothily it's Java for the UI on the disk
Thank you SO MUCH for producing this video! I remember when Sun launched the JavaStations. I always wanted to see them in action. But the product came and went with almost no information made available short of some very basic marketing. (Which was extraordinarily basic considering the state of Web technology in the late 1990s.) Making this video available is a true public service. =)
As for the performance of the machine, I don't think the load times would have been a blocker back then. Machines in the 90s took ages to load applications, fraught with constant hard drive noise. There were also usability problems in terms of occasional application hangs as the system ran out of memory and was forced to swap for a bit before it got back to you.
That being said, the in-application performance is not really acceptable. The lag on typing was far longer than expected once the application was up and running. I suspect you would need at least 32MB of RAM to make the machine somewhat usable. Especially since there's no disk system to swap to. With 16MB the machine is probably garbage collecting for its life.
For comparison the minimum recommendation for Java Swing apps in 1998 was 64MB. Java's Virtual Machine approach was always memory hungry and has only gotten more so with time.
Nice! A working IBM Model M2 in the wild! Mine has issues with the membrane having oxidization :(
I am so impressed with your work on this video. These were going to be the next big thing while I studied for my degree. I do believe the university has been gifted quite a few of them to sell the idea to the students going out in to the real world. I never did get to see one working so thankful, the did seem quite well thought out if hampered by the lan. One thing I should ask, did Corel office launch more quickly the second time. That is, are apps cached and if so did office just swamp the memory management? Once again, a brilliant video.
I have seen in a Fortune magazine article featuring Sun Microsystems. Also in that article, FTD, an American flower shop company was using this thin client PC as store kiosks at that time period (c. 1994).
I do miss Sun. They had great relationships with universities with their software and hardware.
wow an entire os based around java! what an interesting concept.
Consider using a Raspi mini to serially upload config when pressing a button. This could even give a choice of configs if necessary. And a full Raspberry Pi 2b or 3 with network interface can even be server and config provider ;)
You know, I think even an Arduino could manage that, with an Ethernet shield and SD card connected for storage. It would be slow as hell, but it could definitely work, and fit in a extremely small form factor. Both ideas are equally interesting though.
Yeah run risc to acorn & ibm for bluebird tweet in tree no bough?
Thank you for the presentation! Some thoughts - noteworthy, I hope. The two pin connector is to power the fan inside the power supply (the approach to the cooling - just as you summarise - could not easily rely just on some temperature sensors within the power supply, therefore control of the fan is "delegated" to the board with its sensors and software - so, not really a feedback sensu stricto). The serial port is likely to be handled solely by the LT1237CSW RS232 transceiver, without involvement of the NS SuperI/O chip. The NVRAM Sun's chip seems to be replaceable with the ST M48T02. It is the Duke, not some...
I remember my school's library had these. They were painfully slow and the user interface was infuriating.
But the box looked cool.
Amazing work resurrecting an odd & interesting legacy system
That last comment was mental, reverse engineering the host server code by just sniffing the network packets and guessing what the responses should be! How do you even start to do that? Well done!
It wasn't too painful, just involved getting the packet sniffing set up, looking at what sort of requests were coming out from the javastation then a bit of trial and error to get it to work. For example, if I saw it trying to request a file over TFTP, I'd set up a TFTP server hosting that file, when I saw it make an NIS request for login, I set up an NIS server. There was then a few tiny bits of documentation I was able to dig up around the DHCP options used for configuration. The saving grace was that the server uses standard protocols so there was no requirement to build any custom software.
Just got done watching ThioJoe's Worst OS video and thought this sounded so interesting I had to come and check it out.
Nice white background! Looks like heaven!
Great video, appreciate your detailed tour. Would love to have seen what happened when you attempted to save a Wordperfect document or Quattro spreadsheet. Presumably a Save dialog would open showing you a directory on the server where you could save your files, but would this directory area be only for your files ? How secure was it ? Could other Java Station users get to your files ? If you wanted to share files with others, was there a shared area or a way to designate which users who could access your files ? Do you know if there is a version of Java OS that can be installed into a WirtualBox (or other) VM ? Would be cool to have the Java OS client VM and the server VM on one machine and see how much of a speed difference this makes ...
I've not looked into or tried this specifically - my server setup was the bare minimum in order to get the system to boot. As far as I'm aware, it would mount the server using NFS. With NFS it would technically be possible to use standard POSIX permissions to either allow multiple users to access the same files or to restrict files to a specific user/group. Although that said, I have no idea how much of this permission functionality is usable within JavaOS.
Reverse engineering and creating server for this old pc is a work well done. By the way all of the comments are from 5 years ago RUclips is weird man. I feel special
Thanks, it definitely was a fun project! RUclips seems to have randomly decided to start suggesting this video again - it's gone from 20-30 views a day to almost 4000 yesterday alone!
@@camerongray1515 It realy deserves a view, project really looks interesting I never seen system like this.
@@camerongray1515 Have you documented how you setup the server anywhere? I've got one of these I had when I was working on a Java application for the HMRC (IRS in the UK), which was going to be rolled out to 30000 users, in the end it was canned, and we converted to Microsoft J++ running on Windows. Would love to see if it still works.
I love how the mac address spells coffee
get it, because its Java
so clean design
In an alternate universe this took over and all computers run this.
Oddly that's kind of a nice looking speaker for that time and what the system is.
Project Looking Glass showed Sun had big ambitions for a Java-powered desktop future. Really glad it didn't catch on even if looking glass was pretty cool for it's time.
What are you talking about?
@@erict.35 en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass
I came here from ThioJoe's channel. Good video!
Between the audio jack and the sound chip is actually a stereo power amplifier, so it can drive passive speakers.
mjouwbuis nice! i like how the built in speaker is actually enclosed as well. shame it fires into the case lol
i would wonder what it would think of the new java applets Cameron why not try to fix the battery issue and find a cool use in your network for it?
That's one good looking motherboard.
Oh god. I remember these. The pipe dream of thin clients.
I used something like this in the early 2000s at university. Sun had donated a whole lab of SparcStation 5s and some of these.
somebody in some office coded that java os. they had deadlines and that code was most important thing for them for a while.
Ideal for banks and their internal business apps that are basically universally java, especially in that time. Loading up a credit application, entering it, etc.
I hope someday there is dedicated hardware to run my pnf language, which can always run Java (uses their programs) using the JRUN instruction.
Yeah doing minor work to my language again.
Indeed at middle of nineties there was an assumption that general software would run on interpretable byte code languages. Soon turned out that it is not possible due to lack of computing power and memory in computers at those days. No one was ready to change all computer park worldwide for that. Android and ChromeOS also was 15 years away in future.
A Model M-2! Interesting. Did you fix the capacitors?