Sort of, yes, but a slightly different approach.  Xkernel was a 
package that floated around for awhile maybe 11-13 years ago.  It was a 
stripped-down kernel config for SunOS 4 (for Sun3 and SPARC), a shell 
script that replaced /sbin/init, and a few other little things.  You 
configured the machine to netboot, and it basically turned a Sun 
workstation into an X terminal running either a chooser application to 
select a host to connect to, or explicitly "tie" it to one host.  It 
worked very, very well.

   At a large ISP I was involved with throughout the 1990s, we had 
dozens of them sprinkled about.  At first they were back-ended by a 
Sun4-200 which was the "staff server" (its hostname was "ss1", for 
"staff server #1"), but in the later years we migrated the back-end 
services to a few SPARCstation-20 machines...with serial consoles in 
the computer room, as servers should be.

   The machines running Xkernel were Sun3/50, Sun3/60, Sun3/140, and 
Sun4/110 machines.  Once, just because I could, I built one with a 
Sun3/200 CPU board, two 8MB RAM boards, and a framebuffer in a six-slot 
4/150 chassis. :-)

             -Dave

On Mar 7, 2006, at 11:19 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> Aren't we just talking about an X-terminal here? DEC made those almost 
> 20 years ago. Everything in firmware even.
> That's how you play X against a big VAX. :-)
>
> 	Johnny
>
> Dave McGuire wrote:
>> On Mar 7, 2006, at 4:45 PM, Rhialto wrote:
>>> Stuff can be made fairly minimal - I have a stripped down 
>>> NetBSD/sun3 to
>>> run as an X server and nothing else (netbooting). There is not even 
>>> an
>>> init binary: it has been replaced by a shell script.
>>   Mmm, sounds like Xkernel. :-)  I ran an office full of those years 
>> ago.  Very cool indeed.
>>          -Dave
>> -- 
>> Dave McGuire
>> Cape Coral, FL
>
> -- 
> Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
>                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
> email: bqt@update.uu.se           ||  Reading murder books
> pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
>
>

--
Dave McGuire
Cape Coral, FL