workstation model 425 workstation running
HP-UX 9 and
Visual User Environment (VUE) model 735 running
HP-UX and the
Common Desktop Environment (CDE)
Origins and development Workstations predate the first
personal computer (PC). The first computer that might qualify as a workstation was the
IBM 1620, codenamed "CADET", a small scientific computer designed to be used interactively by a single person sitting at the console. It was introduced in 1959. One peculiar feature of this machine was that it lacked any arithmetic circuitry. To perform addition, it required a memory-resident table of decimal addition rules. This reduced the cost of
logic circuitry, enabling IBM to make it inexpensive. It was initially rented for $1000 per month. In 1965, the 1620 was succeeded by the
IBM 1130 scientific computer. Built into roughly desk-sized cabinets with console typewriters, they could be configured with optional add-on disk drives, printers, and both paper-tape and punch-card
I/O. Early workstations were generally dedicated
minicomputers, a multiuser system repurposed for a single user. For example, the
PDP-8 from
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), is regarded as the first commercial minicomputer. Workstations have historically been more advanced than contemporary PCs, with more powerful CPU architectures, more advanced graphics, more memory, and multitasking with sophisticated operating systems like
Unix. They typically offered networking as a standard capability, long before this became prevalent in personal computing. Because of their minicomputer heritage, workstations since their introduction have supported professional and expensive software such as
CAD and
graphics design, as opposed to PCs' games and
text editors. The
Lisp machines developed at
MIT in the early 1970s pioneered some workstation principles, as high-performance, networked, single-user systems intended for heavily interactive use. Lisp machines were commercialized beginning in 1980 by companies such as
Symbolics,
Lisp Machines,
Texas Instruments (the
TI Explorer), and
Xerox (the
Interlisp-D workstations). The first computer designed for a single user, with high-resolution graphics (and so a workstation in the modern sense), was the
Alto developed at
Xerox PARC in 1973. Other early workstations include the
Terak 8510/a (1977),
Three Rivers PERQ (1979), and the later
Xerox Star (1981).
1980s: rise in popularity In the early 1980s, with the advent of
32-bit microprocessors such as the
Motorola 68000, several new competitors appeared, including
Apollo Computer and
Sun Microsystems, with workstations based on the 68000 and
Unix. Meanwhile,
DARPA's
VLSI Project created several spinoff graphics products, such as the
Silicon Graphics 3130. Target markets were differentiated, with Sun and Apollo considered to be network workstations and SGI as graphics workstations. Workstation vendors began to adopt
RISC CPUs in the mid to late 1980s. Competition among RISC vendors lowered CPU prices to as little as $10 per MIPS, much less expensive than the
Intel 80386; after large price cuts in 1987 and 1988, a personal workstation suitable for 2D CAD costing $5,000 to $25,000 (equivalent to $ to $ in ) was available from multiple vendors. Mid-range models capable of 3D graphics cost from $35,000 to $60,000 (equivalent to $ to $ in ), while high-end models overlapping with minicomputers cost from $80,000 to $100,000 (equivalent to $ to $ or more.
InfoWorld in 1989 described Sun as "the unquestioned leader in the workstation arena". It and other RISC workstation vendors like
Hewlett-Packard (HP) were very successful in luring customers from traditional minicomputer companies like DEC and
Data General with more performance per dollar, forcing them to release their own workstations that year. Apollo said that systems costing less than were half of all workstation sales. By then a "personal workstation" might be a high-end PC like the
Macintosh II or
IBM PS/2 Model 80, a low-end workstation, or a hybrid device like the
NeXT Computer, all with similar, overlapping specifications. Workstation prices were declining by 20% annually; the Apollo DN2500 cost as little as , which an industry analyst said was the "magic price point" where customers would consider workstations over PCs.
BYTE predicted "Soon, the only way we'll be able to tell the difference between traditional workstations and PCs will be by the operating system they run", with the former running Unix and the latter running
OS/2,
classic Mac OS, and/or Unix. Many workstations by then had some method to run increasingly popular and powerful PC software such as
Lotus 1-2-3 or
Microsoft Word. Another differentiator between PC and workstation was that the latter was much more likely to have a
graphics accelerator with support for a graphics standard like
PHIGS or
X Window, while the former usually depended on
software rendering or proprietary accelerators. The
computer animation industry's needs typically caused improvements in graphical technology, with CAD using the same improvements later.
BYTE demonstrated that year that an individual could build a workstation with commodity components with specifications comparable to commercially available low-end workstations. By 1990, when IBM announced the
RS/6000, workstations were the fastest-growing segment of the PC market. Competition decreased prices so quickly that
Gartner Group that year advised
depreciation for Unix RISC systems of 45% or more annually, twice the normal rate. Workstations often featured
SCSI or
Fibre Channel disk storage systems, high-end
3D accelerators, single or multiple
64-bit processors, large amounts of
RAM, and well-designed cooling. Additionally, the companies that make the products tend to have comprehensive repair/replacement plans. As the distinction between workstation and PC fades, however, workstation manufacturers have increasingly employed "off-the-shelf" PC components and graphics solutions rather than proprietary hardware or software. Some "low-cost" workstations are still expensive by PC standards but offer binary compatibility with higher-end workstations and servers made by the same vendor. This allows software development to take place on low-cost (relative to the server) desktop machines.
Thin clients Workstations diversified to the lowest possible price point as opposed to performance, called the
thin client or
network computer. Dependent upon a network and server, this reduces the machine to having no
hard drive, and only the CPU, keyboard, mouse, and screen. Some
diskless nodes still run a traditional operating system and perform computations locally, with storage on a remote
server. These are intended to reduce the initial system purchase cost, and the
total cost of ownership, by reducing the amount of administration required per user. This approach was first attempted as a replacement for PCs in office productivity applications, with the
3Station by
3Com. In the 1990s,
X terminals filled a similar role for technical computing. Sun's
thin clients included the
Sun Ray product line. However, purchasing and managing traditional workstations and PCs continued to drop in price and complexity as remote management tools for
IT staff became available, undercutting this market.
3M computer graphics workstation from 1990 workstation: 2×
68030 at 25 MHz, 1280×1024 pixel and 256-color display graphics workstation graphics workstation C8000 workstation running
HP-UX 11i with
CDE In the early 1980s the aspirational target for high-end workstations was the "3M computer", as defined by
Raj Reddy: a megabyte of memory, a megapixel display (roughly 1000×1000 pixels), and one
megaFLOPS compute performance (at least one million floating-point operations per second). This was at least one order of magnitude beyond the capacity of the personal computer of the time. The original 1981
IBM Personal Computer had 16 KB memory, a text-only display, and floating-point performance around ( with the optional 8087 math coprocessor). Another goal was to bring the price below one "
megapenny: less than , which was achieved in the late 1980s. Throughout the early to mid-1990s, many workstations cost from to or more. Other features beyond the typical personal computer of the time included networking, graphics acceleration, and high-speed internal and peripheral data buses.
Decline The increasing adoption of key technologies into mainstream PCs was a direct factor in the decline of the workstation as a separate market segment: • Reliable components • High-performance
3D graphics hardware for
computer-aided design (CAD) and
computer-generated imagery (CGI) animation became increasingly popular in the PC market around the mid-to-late 1990s mostly driven by computer gaming, yielding the first official GPU in
Nvidia's NV10 and the breakthrough
GeForce 256. • High-performance
CPUs: the first
RISC CPUs of the early 1980s offered roughly one order of magnitude in performance improvement over
CISC processors of comparable cost.
Intel's
x86 CISC family always had the edge in market share and the
economies of scale that this implied. By the mid-1990s, some CISC processors like the
Motorola 68040 and Intel's
80486 and
Pentium have performance parity with RISC in some areas, such as integer performance (at the cost of greater chip complexity) and hardware
floating-point calculations, relegating RISC to even more high-end markets. • Hardware support for floating-point operations: optional on the original IBM PC; remained on a separate chip for Intel systems until the
80486DX processor. Even then, x86 floating-point performance lagged other processors due to limitations in its architecture. Even low-price PCs have long offered performance in the gigaFLOPS range. • High-performance/high-capacity data storage: early workstations tend to use proprietary disk interfaces until the SCSI standard of the mid-1980s. Although SCSI interfaces soon became available for IBM PCs, they were comparatively expensive and tend to be limited by the speed of the PC's
ISA peripheral bus. SCSI is an advanced controller interface good for multitasking and daisy chaining. This makes it suited for use in servers, and its benefits to desktop PCs which mostly run single-user operating systems are less clear, but it was standard on the 1980s-1990s Macintosh.
Serial ATA is more modern, with throughput comparable to SCSI but at a lower cost. • High-speed
networking (10 Mbit/s or better): 10 Mbit/s network interfaces were commonly available for PCs by the early 1990s, although by that time workstations were pursuing even higher networking speeds, moving to 100 Mbit/s, 1 Gbit/s, and 10 Gbit/s. However, economies of scale and the demand for high-speed networking in even non-technical areas have dramatically decreased the time it takes for newer networking technologies to reach commodity price points. • Large displays (17- to 21-inch) with high resolutions and high refresh rates for graphics and CAD work, which were rare among PCs in the late 1980s and early 1990s but became common among PCs by the late 1990s. • Large memory configurations: PCs (such as IBM clones) were originally limited to 640 KB of RAM until the 1982 introduction of the
80286 processor; early workstations had megabytes of memory. IBM clones require special programming techniques to address more than 640 KB until the 80386, as opposed to other 32-bit processors such as
SPARC which provide straightforward access to nearly their entire 4 GB memory address range. 64-bit workstations and servers supporting an address range far beyond 4 GB have been available since the early 1990s, a technology just beginning to appear in the PC desktop and server market in the mid-2000s. •
Operating system: early workstations ran the
Unix operating system (OS), a
Unix-like variant, or other feature-rich OSes such as
VMS. The PC CPUs of the time had limitations in memory capacity and
memory access protection, making them unsuitable to run OSes of this sophistication, but this, too, began to change in the late 1980s as PCs with the
32-bit 80386, with integrated paged
MMUs, became widely affordable and enabling
OS/2,
Windows NT 3.1, and Unix-like systems based on
BSD and
Linux on commodity PC hardware. • Tight integration between the OS and the hardware: Workstation vendors both design the hardware and maintain the Unix operating system variant that runs on it. This allows for much more rigorous testing than is possible with an operating system such as Windows. Windows requires that third-party hardware vendors write compliant hardware drivers that are stable and reliable. Also, minor variations in hardware quality such as timing or build quality can affect the reliability of the overall machine. Workstation vendors are able to ensure both the quality of the hardware, and the stability of the operating system drivers by validating these things in-house, and this leads to a generally much more reliable and stable machine.
Market position with
AMD's
Opteron processor and
Solaris 10 Since the late 1990s, the workstation and consumer markets have further merged. Many low-end workstation components are now the same as the consumer market, and the price differential narrowed. For example, most
Macintosh Quadra computers were originally intended for scientific or design work, all with the
Motorola 68040 CPU, backward compatible with
68000 Macintoshes. The consumer
Macintosh IIcx and
Macintosh IIci models can be upgraded to the
Quadra 700. "In an era when many professionals preferred Silicon Graphics workstations, the Quadra 700 was an intriguing option at a fraction of the cost" as resource-intensive software such as
Infini-D brought "studio-quality 3D rendering and animations to the home desktop". The Quadra 700 can run
A/UX 3.0, making it a
Unix workstation. Another example is the
Nvidia GeForce 256 consumer graphics card, which spawned the
Quadro workstation card, which has the same GPU but different driver support and certifications for CAD applications and a much higher price. Workstations have typically driven advancements in CPU technology. All computers benefit from multi-processor and multicore designs (essentially, multiple processors on a
die). The multicore design was pioneered by IBM's
POWER4; it and Intel Xeon have multiple CPUs, more on-die cache, and ECC memory. Some workstations are designed or certified for use with only one specific application such as
AutoCAD,
Avid Xpress Studio HD, or
3D Studio Max. The certification process increases workstation prices. ==Modern market==