I remember the days at university sitting in the X Terminal lab so you could connect to the "big iron" to get applications like Maple. Or to connect to the Sun

I remember the days at university sitting in the X Terminal lab so you could connect to the "big iron" to get applications like Maple. Or to connect to the Sun boxes, or the DEC machines. All with the local terminal handling window management. For a sliver of time, when security was less of a concern, there were actually web sites that would fire up a client (local to them) that would appear on your X terminal.