Sun Microsystems Inc chief Scott McNealy at UniForum showed off his Sparc-based Internet terminal and called it a Java client. He says it will ship at the end of the year, but insisted that Sun will be a minor player in this hardware sector. It has 8Mb memory on the Sparc but no disks, and does not even have an operating system – it boots up from the server. He says a user could access a Java word processor over the Internet, use it to write a document on the Java client and send the word processor back over the network. Sun doesn’t want to be big in the low- margin terminals but will make its hardware designs available to others.
