Workstations

Origins and development

Workstations have historically been more advanced than contemporary PCs, with more powerful CPU architectures, more advanced graphics, more memory, and multitasking with sophisticated operating systems like Unix. They typically offered networking as a standard capability, long before this became prevalent in personal computing. Because of their minicomputer heritage, workstations since their introduction have supported professional and expensive software such as CAD and graphics design, as opposed to PCs' games and . The Lisp machines developed at MIT in the early 1970s pioneered some workstation principles, as high-performance, networked, single-user systems intended for heavily interactive use. Lisp machines were commercialized beginning in 1980 by companies such as Symbolics, Lisp Machines, Texas Instruments (the TI Explorer), and Xerox (the Interlisp-D workstations). The first computer designed for a single user, with high-resolution graphics (and so a workstation in the modern sense), was the Alto developed at Xerox PARC in 1973. Other early workstations include the Terak 8510/a (1977), Three Rivers PERQ (1979), and the later Xerox Star (1981).