[TUHS] Whither Workstations? (Was Re: Demise of AT&T)

[Dan Cross]

On Mon, May 19, 2025 at 4:28 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> On Monday, May 19th, 2025 at 12:45 PM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, May 19, 2025 at 12:36 PM Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu wrote:
> > > > [snip]
> > > > It wasn't just AT&T, IBM & DEC that got run over by commodity DRAM &
> > > > CPU's, it was the entire Minicomputer Industry, effectively extinct by
> > > > 1995.
> > >
> > > Same thing for the work-station industry (with Sun being merely the most
> > > notable example). I have a tiny bit of second-hand personal knowldge in this
> > > area; my wife works for NASA, as a structural engineer, and they run a lot of
> > > large computerized mathematical models. In the 70's, they were using CDC
> > > 7600's; they moved along through various things as technology changed (IIRC,
> > > at one point they had SGI machines). These days, they seem to mostly be using
> > > high-end personal computers for this.
> > >
> > > Some specialized uses (various forms of CAD) I guess still use things that
> > > look like work-stations, but I expect they are stock personal computers
> > > with special I/O (very large displays, etc).
> > >
> > > So I guess now there are just supercomputers (themselves mostly built out of
> > > large numbers of commodity CPUs), and laptops. Well, there is also cloud
> > > computing, which is huge, but that also just uses lots of commodity CPUs.
> >
> >
> > The CPU ISAs may be largely shared, but computing has bifurcated
> > into two distinct camps: those machines intended for use in
> > datacenters, and those intended for consumer use by end-users.
> >
> > CPUs intended for datacenters tend to be characterized by large
> > caches, lower average clock speeds, wider IO and memory bandwidth.
> > Those intended for consumer use tend to have high clock speeds, a bit
> > less cache, and support for comparatively fewer IO devices/less
> > memory. On the end-user side, you've got a further split between
> > laptops/desktop machines and devices like phones, tablets, and so on.
> >
> > In both cases, the dominant IO buses used are PCIe and its variants
> > (e.g., on the data center side you've got CXL), NVMe for storage is
> > common in lots of places, everything supports Ethernet more or less
> > (even WiFi uses the ethernet frame format), and so on. USB seems
> > ubiquitous for peripherals on the end-user side.
> >
> > In short, these machines may be called "personal computers" and they
> > may be PCs in the sense of being used primarily by one user, but
> > contemporary data center machines have more in common with mainframes
> > and high-end servers than the original PCs, and consumer machines are
> > much closer architecturally to high end workstations than to
> > yesteryear's PCs.
> >
> > My desktop machine is a Mac Studio with an ARM CPU; I call it a
> > workstation and I think that's pretty accurate. At work, one of our
> > EE's has a big x86 thing with some stupidly powerful graphics card
> > that he uses to do board layout. It's a workstation in every
> > recognizable sense, though it does happen to run Windows.
>
> This may be getting into the weeds a bit but don't forget industrial hardware, the stuff where you approach the blurry demarcation between CPU and MCU.

That's fair. I also ignored SBCs like the Raspberry Pi and its
imitators and strictly embedded stuff.

> This for me is always the third class when I'm discussing that sort of thing.  Of course this also means "operating systems" closer to standalone applications sitting on top of some microkernel like (se)L4, but you did have VME-based workstations and UNIX versions specifically for VME systems.  For me these walk a line between true workstations and minicomputers, but as usual that is from the perspective of having not been there.  For the record, one of the canonical UNIX development environments from AT&T for WE32x00 stuff was a WE32100 and support chips thrown on a VME module running System V/VME.  From what I know, VME is still quite common in industrial control.  How much UNIX and workalikes constitute the OS landscape in today's VME ecosystem eludes me.

My sense is that a lot of industrial hardware these days follows the
same pattern as consumer devices, albeit often in a hardened chassis
or with slightly different peripherals that allow them to work in
environments with temperature extremes, poor airflow, and so on. I
don't get the sense that VME is still the dominant factor that it once
was in that space, but I'm not on a factory floor, either. Idly, I
wonder how many industrial systems are built from, say, a Raspberry Pi
compute module?

Perhaps a more interesting third dimension would be safety-critical
systems in automotive, aerospace, or medical applications. The PC in
my doctor's office is just a small desktop thing running Windows and a
bunch of software from EPIC, but the automagic blood pressure cuff
with the nifty graphical display the nurse uses to take my vitals is
something else entirely.

> Either way, I feel like this is a class of computers that frequently flies under the radar, but if we're talking strictly consumer stuff, yeah VME very quickly loses relevance.

Interestingly, some of the earlier Sun machines were VME based. As I
recall, if you popped the hood off of a "pizzabox" Sun 3/50, there was
a VME SBC in there with some drive bays. In that regard, the
SPARCstation 1 paper is worth reading as an evolutionary marker.

        - Dan C.