The MarioNet Internet Appliance is an application that runs on a server and sends pre-rendered graphical images to a light-weight client for display.
It was prototyped in January 1999 at iCentrix Ltd in Andover, Hampshire, UK, by former Caldera UK employees led by Roger Alan Gross[1] and Andrew Thomas Wightman.
The concept behind MarioNet was to build a thin-client browser to provide web-based content to very small client platforms with little RAM or ROM and minimal processing power. It was designed to run on a range of embedded operating systems or indeed a ROM platform without an operating system. The server side used Mozilla, the recently open-sourced web browser based on Netscape's Navigator. A proprietary protocol called OPTIC was used to communicate between the two parts.
Target client devices included cell phones, tablet devices, touch screen information kiosks and vending machines.