When I was in Uni our IT department had rolled out Sun Ray systems and they were actually pretty cool. You'd have a smart card you'd insert into the device which would give you a login page. You'd log in, use your apps. If you had to leave, you pulled the smart card and left. Then you could go to another Sun Ray, maybe in another building, and insert your smart card and your session would pop up with your apps still open, etc.

It was very much like running an X11 server/terminal, except the session could stay open while you moved to another physical terminal. This was great for universities where you might be working on something, have to rush off to class, then could head back to a terminal to pick up where you left off. Also handy if you have long-running tasks that you don't want to interrupt.

Theoretically, given a sufficient networking configuration/VPN/etc., you could pull your smart card out of the Sun Ray in your university office, go home, and then drop your smart card into a Sun Ray at home and still have everything back where you left off.

It was basically the last great innovation of the mainframe/terminal server paradigm, as far as I'm aware. A little late to the party, since by that time most students in CS had laptops and the rest used computers at home, but still very cool.