For Sun workstations there were the great SunPCI cards - a full x86 computer in the form of a PCI-X card. You had some USB and a VGA port if you wanted to hook up an external display, but more often you'd use the video redirection and have it displayed in a window on your desktop.

No connectors for disk drives - it'd emulate an IDE disk from file in your Solaris filesystem. So pretty much the VM experience, just in not bad.

VMWare was around since the late 90s - but at that time you typically had a computer with a single thread. If you were splurging, a system with two CPUs (two threads). Even a moderately load intensive VM would make working on the host system annoying.

Due to power and thermal constraints the hardware on there wasn't the fastest - but it was fast enough, and due to the absence of resource sharing (apart from disk bandwidth, which wasn't an issue) the overall experience was way better than using VMs.

I still have my final workstation around - a dual CPU Blade 2500 with 2 SunPCI 3 cards.

> VMWare was around since the late 90s - but at that time you typically had a computer with a single thread. If you were splurging, a system with two CPUs (two threads). Even a moderately load intensive VM would make working on the host system annoying.

VMware released their first product in May '99. Where you thinking of Wabi?