For a while I've had my eye out for a JavaStation.
Sun Microsystems were one of the few companies that seemed to appreciate diskless workstations years before the whole "Network Computer" (NC) fad made it fassionable. I don't know much about the Sun 1 and 2 series of the early eighties, but by 1985 and the Sun 3 series, they were shipping diskless workstations and deskside or rack-mount machines that served up disk space to them. This continued to be an option into the nineties SPARC era, with the SLC and ELC workstations, which were built into 17" (26cm) mono monitors. The JavaStation series seems to have been a last gasp for diskless workstations from Sun, albeit running Java applications instead of unix ones. The JavaStation was killed off to make room for Sun Ray, a range of graphical terminals.
Historical interest aside, I bought a JavaStation NC "Krups" because it's purple so that I could potch a bit with diskless booting and because I'm told it can run NetBSD. Powering up Krups startles me somewhat. Rationally I know it's diskless, but when I push the power button the screen lights up but the box remains perfectly silent: no disks, no fans, no noise. It should be perfect in our front room playing Ogg/Vorbis or MP3 files through the stereo.
