26 Jan
2023
26 Jan
'23
2:06 a.m.
I think what made 'workstations' different was:
1) You had your own computer, you were not just using a terminal
connected to a computer, that was time-shared with a bunch of other users
2) A very capable large bit-mapped display, hence the variation on this
term, "graphic workstation"
3) Networking to shared filesystems - in time sharing, you're all on one
computer, going to the same files on the same disk(s), in a network of
workstations, you're all going to a network with filesystems mounted on
disks on machines all over the network. Some workstations had disks and
filesystems, some did not - hence another variation, "disk-less
workstation", which booted from the network. "Servers" were big machines
with big disks, really the same kinds of machines, basically, but
configured to be effective at hosting resources and people were
discouraged from logging in and camping out on them.
That's how I remember it, the machines and capabilities were also
accompanied by the different modes of resource use that they enabled.
On 01/25/2023 05:51 PM, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
Nothing says a PDP-11 has to be in a rack with
peripherals right? If
one could devise up emulated peripherals that plug into the backplane
or otherwise tear them down to fit in much less space, a PDP-11 could
probably be made to inhabit similar desk real-estate as a workstation,
especially some of the smaller LSI models. There's also the MicroVAXen
but the SUN-1 beats those to the market.
All in all, I would wager workstation has never been a well regulated
term and, especially once PCs and other micros got better, the
delineation between a workstation and a consumer PC has just gotten
blurrier and blurrier. For instance, I would use the term workstation
to apply to my Raspberry Pi, someone else would probably chuckle at
the thought while sitting at their modern POWER9 system. It fits all
the needs of my non-day-job computing, so workstation enough for me.
- Matt G.
------- Original Message -------
On Wednesday, January 25th, 2023 at 4:31 PM, Joseph Holsten
<joseph(a)josephholsten.com> wrote:
It seems like there are bountiful articles able
the decline and fall
of the UNIX workstation, but I’ve had a hard time finding narrative
about workstations prior to the Stanford SUN workstation.
* was the SUN-1 the first commercially successful product? What are
the “it depends” edge cases?
* were there common recipes for proto-workstations within academic or
industrial research? What did those look like, who was involved?
* What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had
a PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a
workstation? Is it the integration of display into the system that
differentiates?
--
Joseph Holsten
http://josephholsten.com <http://josephholsten.com/>
mailto:joseph@josephholsten.com <mailto:joseph@josephholsten.com>
tel:+1-360-927-7234 <tel:%28360%29%20927-7234>