Despite being marketed as a “thin client” (as if it was something completely different to an ordinary computer), the Network Station 300 is still, essentially, a computer. Just like any computer, it needs some software to run in order to serve any useful function.
In its default hardware configuration, the Network Station does not have any locally attached storage. There are no floppy disk drives, no CD/DVD drives, and no hard drives; nothing where software could be loaded from. Yet as the name implies, the Network Station does have a network port.
The Network Station loads all the needed software—including its own operating system—over the local network, from a separate server. The Network Station operating system files must therefore be downloaded and installed on a separate computer on your LAN, shared to the network with the NFS protocol, before you can actually start using your Network Station. The sections below explain how.
The documentation mentions that PCMCIA “linear flash” memory cards can also be used for booting the device. This would make the Network Station 300 a stand-alone device.
However, as IBM only provides a handful of native, locally-run applications (a couple of terminal emulators, an outdated web browser, and an equally-outdated Java Virtual Machine), the benefits might not be all that great: even if you can boot the operating system off a PCMCIA card, you will still need an application server (of some sort) to connect to in order to do anything productive or complicated. (Things would, of course, be completely different if you could compile native applications on your own.)