Sun Microsystems Inc was one of thirteen companies supposedly there to show off their fabled Network Computers at SCO Forum last week. In fact almost none of the manufacturers set them up in the way they are meant to be used: that is as a thin client downloading applets from a server. It was something of an oxymoron: stand-alone Network Computers. One that did have a server, Maxspeed Corp’s product, was four years old and hadn’t been changed at all, just re-badged as a Network Computer. Naturally it had no Java virtual machine. Sun couldn’t even get its server up and running: it just displayed a Sparcstation 5 with a couple of dummy Java terminals sitting forlornly alongside.
