Admittedly, it's getting harder for the traditional workstation vendors to compete with the PC workstation vendors. Intel's Pentium II and Pentium II Xeon processors are faster than the best offerings in some RISC families. SCSI and Fast Ethernet work just about as well on the PC platform as they do anywhere else. We need a new word, I think, to make it easier to identify these premium systems. I just can't think of a way to keep unworthy OEMs from stealing any new term we might come up with.
Ideas are welcome. .
JEP Peter, Sorry to add to the confusion. The OS is only slightly more reliable than a generic desktop OS, and while it may be compatible with multithreaded software, the overall system provides no specific support for multithreading. I'm not sure that any rigid line exists nowadays to differentiate workstations from PCs. Those are good operating systems but they just aren't as sophisticated or mature as Solaris or Irix. On the other hand, NT has a huge edge in application compatibility.