Re:SPARCbook 3000ST
by throw0101a on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @09:56AM
(#19554078)
Disk was expensive back in the day.
Depending on your compute needs, it could have made more sense to do fully-remote X.
So if many people were running intensive like MATLAB or Mathematica, then root/swap-over-NFS made sense so that you could use your local workstations local CPU all to yourself(s) and not bog down the central server. If most people were doing modest things (xterm, mail, browsing), then running everything on the central server and displaying it on dumb X11 terminals wasn't a bad idea.
Depending on your compute needs, it could have made more sense to do fully-remote X.
So if many people were running intensive like MATLAB or Mathematica, then root/swap-over-NFS made sense so that you could use your local workstations local CPU all to yourself(s) and not bog down the central server. If most people were doing modest things (xterm, mail, browsing), then running everything on the central server and displaying it on dumb X11 terminals wasn't a bad idea.