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.
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@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?
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