The first computer designed for single-users, with high-resolution graphics facilities (and so a workstation in the modern sense of the term) was the Xerox Alto developed at Xerox PARC in 1973. Lisp Machines were commercialized beginning 1980 by companies like Symbolics, Lisp Machines, Texas Instruments (the TI Explorer) and Xerox (the Interlisp-D workstations). The Lisp machines developed at MIT in the early 1970s pioneered some of the principles of the workstation computer, as they were high-performance, networked, single-user systems intended for heavily interactive use. A notable example was the PDP-8 from Digital Equipment Corporation, regarded to be the first commercial minicomputer. A console typewriter for direct interaction was standard on each.Įarly examples of workstations were generally dedicated minicomputers a system designed to support a number of users would instead be reserved exclusively for one person. Both were available with add-on disk drives, printers, and both paper-tape and punched-card I/O. Both the 1620 and the 1130 were built into roughly desk-sized cabinets. Both of these systems came with the ability to run programs written in Fortran and other languages.
In 1965, IBM introduced the IBM 1130 scientific computer, which was meant as the successor to the 1620. Nonetheless, it rented initially for $1000 a month. The machine was code-named CADET, which some people waggishly claimed meant "Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try". This saved on the cost of logic circuitry, enabling IBM to make it inexpensive. To perform addition, it required a memory-resident table of decimal addition rules. One peculiar feature of the machine was that it lacked any actual arithmetic circuitry.
Perhaps the first computer that might qualify as a "workstation" was the IBM 1620, a small scientific computer designed to be used interactively by a single person sitting at the console. The Xerox Alto workstation, first to use a graphical user interface with mouse and origin of ethernet. Alternative Unix-based platforms are provided by Apple Inc. Presently, the workstation market is highly commoditized and is dominated by large PC vendors, such as Dell and HP, selling Microsoft Windows/ Linux running on Intel Xeon/AMD Opteron. Workstations are the first segment of the computer market to present advanced accessories and collaboration tools. Typically, consoles consist of a high resolution display, a keyboard and a mouse at a minimum, but also offer multiple displays, graphics tablets, 3D mice (devices for manipulating 3D objects and navigating scenes), etc. computational fluid dynamics), animation and rendering of images, and mathematical plots. They are optimized for the visualization and manipulation of different types of complex data such as 3D mechanical design, engineering simulation (e.g. The term workstation has also been used to refer to a mainframe computer terminal or a PC connected to a network.īoth being microcomputers, workstations had offered higher performance than desktop computers, especially with respect to CPU and graphics, memory capacity, and multitasking capability. Intended primarily to be used by one person at a time, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. Sun SPARCstation 1+, 25 MHz RISC processor from early 1990sĪ workstation is a high-end microcomputer designed for technical or scientific applications.