The NC is one of those things that feels like it was simply to far ahead of where the technology and the mind set of users was. Nowadays it would have much more traction thanks to SaaS.
In tech, one step ahead is an innovator. Two step ahead is a martyr.
> The NC is one of those things that feels like it was simply to far ahead of where the technology and the mind set of users was.
They were just like X dumb terminals that predated them by about a decade: far behind what the technology was offering with storage and computing power becoming cheaper every year.
I'm glad they never caught up, and hope the same happens to Chromeboxes/books; I don't want prices of common hardware I use go up because of market shrinkage due to lots of people ditching real computers in favor of dumb terminals where even the simplest service is something that they must access and run remotely with no or reduced local storage/computing power.
Sorry for having an unpopular opinion, but to me SaaS is like going back 40-50 years to the mainframes era, and essentially is a way to put everything behind a counter so that users can be charged tomorrow for what today is still free.
Trivia at this point. But the Oracle Network Computer was a low-end x86 box running FreeBSD and a full-screen Netscape Navigator. Very much a product of its time.
(WebTV, later purchased by Microsoft, was the more successful product in this space.)
Acorn did the reference profile NC for Oracle, and it was an ARM7-based machine with NCOS, a stripped down version of RISC OS. The Acorn-built NCs were then sold under a variety of brandings, including Acorn's own and Xemplar (the Acorn/Apple education collaboration in the UK). Was the Oracle Network Computer a later variant?
In tech, one step ahead is an innovator. Two step ahead is a martyr.