Each week, I have to decide a topic for this column. The problem is not finding a topic, but choosing one from the many obvious candidates. A few times, I've tried to cover more than one topic, but there is a firm nerd contingent among my readers who think we have a contract allowing only a single topic per week. I am not here to argue, so they win. But this week I am torn, since there are obvious developments in the news as well as the 30th anniversary of the first Arpanet node coming to life. Or I could even try to explain why last Week, I thought former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's first name was "George." The answer to this last mystery is easy — dementia. As for the Arpanet birthday, having done three hours of Internet history for television and written several columns on the subject already, this time I'll just congratulate all concerned with those events back at UCLA: It has been quite a ride.

That first Arpanet Interface Message Processor (IMP) was built from a Honeywell computer used by the military. In the early 1980s, the Internet building block of choice came to be logic boards for Sun workstations. The first Cisco routers, for example, were built from Sun logic boards designed by Andy Bechtolscheim when he was a graduate student at Stanford. So too, the first Silicon Graphics workstations were Sun workstations with extra 3D capability added-in by Jim Clark. All of these companies were founded in the same building and all are still on the scene, but this week, I'd say Sun has been making the most news, though in a disturbingly regressive manner.

Last week, I wrote about Sun's acquisition of Star Office, and how this would put a virtually free office suite up against Microsoft for both PC- and server-based versions. Well, this week the other shoe dropped as Sun introduced its candidate workstation for the server-based version. It is a funny little box called the Sun Ray 1 Enterprise Appliance, into which you attach a keyboard, mouse and screen, then use an Ethernet connection to the world. The Sun Ray looks to be a successor to Sun's own unpopular JavaStation and the logical heir to the network computing crown. Or is it?

The Sun Ray is great from a configuration standpoint, since it requires no configuration at all. You couldn't configure it if you wanted to. If the box breaks, you replace it with another. Plug it into power and Ethernet, and it is ready to go. This is all marketing talk here, but reading it I came to have an unsettling feeling. Then it came to me. The Sun Ray, for all its high design and ease of use, is not a computer at all or even a computing device. It is a computer terminal. Sun's answer to Microsoft is to take corporate America back to a souped-up version of 1970's minicomputing.

The only application that runs in the Sun Ray is whatever paints the screen and accepts keyboard and mouse input. That's a computer terminal where I come from. Presumably, there is a TCP/IP stack and something like an X-Window server, though Sun does an excellent job of not telling us that. What's definitely NOT happening in the box is anything like Java, which Sun has finally figured out isn't up to the task. Instead, all the real computing is done back on a hefty Sun server and only screen rendering happens in the Sun Ray.

There is another outfit called Network Computing Devices that makes boxes like this, which it calls X-terminals. NCD was founded by Bill Carrico and Judy Estrin, a husband and wife team who also founded Bridge Communications (later part of 3Com) and Precept Software (later part of Cisco). Judy is now the Chief Technical Officer at Cisco, which fits perfectly into my theory that there are really only 25 people in the computer business. They just keep changing jobs. I remember visiting Bill and Judy late in their tenure at NCD, a time that wasn't particularly happy since X-terminals were being rapidly replaced with cheap PCs running X-server software. In the world of X, what we would normally call a "client" — that part of the application that runs on the workstation rather than on that big box in the computer room — is called a "server." Go figure.

The wonderful thing about an X-terminal is that it does an end-run around user ego. NCD boxes were all connected through Ethernet to a Sun server. How many X-terminals could a Sun server serve? Lots. Typically 25-50 terminals could be run by a single server that cost a lot more than a PC, but sure didn't cost 25-50 times as much. Still, that day I visited Bill and Judy, they saw the end coming. Why? Because PCs were cheaper than X-terminals and they could run local applications, too. With PCs even cheaper today, what has changed to make Bill and Judy wrong and Sun happy to enter this new business?

Well NCD, which is still very much in business, didn't sell servers, and Sun does, so that's an enormous difference. Sun makes its dough on this deal not from the Sun Rays or from Star Office, but from the big iron it sells to support both. And in the last few years, the world of corporate computing has come to fixate on Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), which includes everything from the cost of training users to replacing busted boxes. In the grand scheme of TCO, the original purchase price of a PC is almost insignificant, dwarfed by the human cost of setting-up and shifting and training, etc., all of which are minimized by the Sun Ray/Star Office combo. On a TCO basis, the Sun Ray is damned cheap, and with Sun offering leases at under $10 per month, it is a good deal for many businesses.

But don't expect to run your Sun Ray at home because its sparkling performance has more than anything to do with that 100 megabits-per-second Ethernet connection. Running over a 56K modem won't work at all. And don't even think of using a Sun Ray unless you want at least 25 of them, because it's only at those scales that the costs begin to come into line. What this means, then, is that the Sun Ray is far from a Microsoft killer. Rather, it is a Microsoft annoyance. But for Sun, it is still a very good business.

The nerds will say this is obvious and that I'm again wasting their time, but most of the people who read this column aren't nerds. They'll say, "Now I get it."