Netbooted machines were not that uncommon in the past. I implemented and ran a large scale nfsroot build farm around 2010. The company was in the business of high end NFS storage so maximum dogfooding was a part of the goal. Prior to that at another company we had most of the infra (including stuff like corporate email and web servers) and also all the engineering user desktops on nfsroot. Seems a bit crazy in a hindsight but it got the company through the startup years and shipping several generations of products.
