[TUHS] Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Chris Hanson]

On Jan 25, 2023, at 4:31 PM, Joseph Holsten <joseph at 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?

Nope, Apollo and the Three Rivers PERQ both predate Sun. And while one can certainly question PERQ's commercial success I don't think one can question Apollo's—they were done in by HP's purchase, not by market forces.

Apollo Aegis wasn't actually UNIX, but was very UNIX-like since it was designed by people who had worked at Prime on PrimOS and on MULTICS before that. And later releases provided more specifically UNIX-style environments for users as an alternative to Aegis.

The Three Rivers PERQ had several different environments available, including multiple UNIX implementations.

> * were there common recipes for proto-workstations within academic or industrial research? What did those look like, who was involved?

They mostly looked like the Xerox Alto, once it made waves in the research community.

> * 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? 

I think "a graphical system intended to be used by a professional to use in their work" is a good starting point for a definition. I should check at home tonight how "A History of Personal Workstations" defines it. Note that I wouldn't necessarily require a workstation to be primarily used by a single user; lots of 1970s CAD systems supported multiple user workstations on a single computer.

  -- Chris