[TUHS] Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[Marc Donner]

PERQ

There was some talk of making Unix run on it, but POS (PERQ-OS) was written
in Pascal and there was no reasonable way to port over all of the existing
stuff without rewriting it all.  I had a PERQ in my office for a while … it
put out so much heat and noise that my officemates lobbied to have me
evicted.

On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 8:01 PM Larry Stewart <stewart at serissa.com> wrote:

> There was quite a lot of early activity of course!
> Essentially all of computer science academia was aware of the Xerox Alto,
> although it wasn't a commercial product and wasn't Unix.
>
> Jim Morris left PARC and went off to CMU and began talking up the idea of
> the "3M" workstation.  One MIPs, One Megabyte of RAM, and One Million
> Pixels.
>
> One of the early commercial attempts was the Three Rivers PERC (or PERQ?)
> from the Pittsburgh startup.  There were Unix adjacent systems as well,
> such as Apollo Domain.
>
> Of course then Sun got started, and MIPS, and the IBM RT and VaxStations
> so by the mid '80s it was quite crowded.
>
> There is a whole other arc about the graphics workstations, with SGI,
> Ardent, Stellar, Stardent, and so on.
>
> Also, before graphics became affordable, there were various clustered
> character generator based systems like Convergent Technologies.
>
> -L
>
> On Jan 25, 2023, at 7:31 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?
> * 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
> mailto:joseph at josephholsten.com
> tel:+1-360-927-7234 <(360)%20927-7234>
>
> --
=====
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