page_title: Workstation
section_title: "3M computer"
hierarchical_section_title: Workstation / History / "3M computer"
caption_attribution_description: Sony NeWS workstation - Mike Chapman - public domain
context_page_description: A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by one person at a time, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term workstation has also been used loosely to refer to everything from a mainframe computer terminal to a PC connected to a network, but the most common form refers to the class of hardware offered by several current and defunct companies such as Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Apollo Computer, DEC, HP, NeXT and IBM which opened the door for the 3D graphics animation revolution of the late 1990s.
  Workstations offer higher performance than mainstream personal computers, especially with respect to CPU and graphics, memory capacity, and multitasking capability. Workstations are optimized for the visualization and manipulation of different types of complex data such as 3D mechanical design, engineering simulation, animation and rendering of images, and mathematical plots.
context_section_description: In the early 1980s, a high-end workstation had to meet the three Ms. The so-called "3M computer" had a Megabyte of memory, a Megapixel display (roughly 1000×1000), and a "MegaFLOPS" compute performance (at least one million floating point operations per second).  As limited as this seems today, it was at least an order of magnitude beyond the capacity of the personal computer of the time; the original 1981 IBM Personal Computer had 16 KB memory, a text-only display, and floating-point performance around 1 kiloFLOPS (30 kiloFLOPS with the optional 8087 math coprocessor).  Other desirable features not found in desktop computers at that time included networking, graphics acceleration, and high-speed internal and peripheral data buses.
  Another goal was to bring the price for such a system down under a "Megapenny", that is, less than $10,000; this was not achieved until the late 1980s, although many workstations, particularly mid-range or high-end still cost anywhere from $15,000 to $100,000 and over throughout the early to mid-1990s.
caption: Sony NEWS workstation: 2x 68030 @ 25 MHz, 1280x1024 256-color display
exif: {}