Talk:Workstation

message: :The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section. 
The result of the debate was move. Do not revert this move.  --Philip Baird Shearer 23:20, 22 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Add *Support or *Oppose followed by an optional one-sentence explanation, then sign your opinion with ~~~~
* Oppose. The term 'workstation' predates its current use in the computer industry; I believe it first came into use in the early days of assembly line manufacturing but I don't have a verifying citation to back that up. User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 00:44, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

text: Add any additional comments
* Tag the redirect Workstation with :Template:R with possibilities. User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 00:44, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Requested move

message: :Add *Support or *Oppose followed by an optional one-sentence explanation, then sign your opinion with ~~~~
* Oppose. The term 'workstation' predates its current use in the computer industry; I believe it first came into use in the early days of assembly line manufacturing but I don't have a verifying citation to back that up. User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 00:44, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Survey

message: :Add any additional comments
* Tag the redirect Workstation with :Template:R with possibilities. User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 00:44, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Discussion

message: observation:
i've been musing about some of the same questions being debated here and looked up this article to see what wikipedia folk had  to say about them, so i'm not terribly surprised to find the debate.
suggestions:
on definitions:
-- point out that the term "workstation" has had different meanings in different contexts and has evolved over the years.
-- two general concepts of workstation: 
-- -- a computer designed to be used interactively by one person at a time that is built using techniques typically used for multi-user computers (servers or timesharing minicomputers depending on the historical period) and puts all the associated perfomance and reliability resources at one user's disposal.  
[ note this phrase appears mid-article: "Personal computers, in contrast to workstations, were not designed to bring minicomputer performance to an engineer's desktop, but rather..." ]
-- -- a computer and peripherals deidcated to a specialized use (faxing, laboritory instrumentation monitoring, etc.
an entirely different approach to the definition problem is base the definition not so much on the hardware and software and software architecture, but on the business problem and the user.  
AFAIK workstations have typically been asigned to users working on large time-sensitive problems that are important to the organization and/or to users whose time is expensive.  in other words, firms spend extra money to put big, fast, reliable boxes in the hands of some users and not others based on business criteria.   now, how you go about expressing that concisely is another question.  :-)
Ericfluger 18:57, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  misc obesrvations and suggestions 

message: the article gives some attention to the business incentives to deploy workstations, but i think a bit more is merited.  after reading what's there i still have some basic questions that i think are still reasonably in-scope for an encyclopedia article. 
[ i recognize that in a business setting almost any criteria for problem solving is ultimatately reducable to cost/revenue considerations, but having said that... ] 
i'm wondering if initial popularity of workstations was due to cost-effectiveness of offloading from the mainframe, or whether they simply provided a practical way of doing things that otherwise might have been quite difficult at the time.  
IIRC at the time the workstation concept was starting to take hold, connecting multiple high resolution high speed graphics terminals to one mainframe and locating such termials far from the machine room would have been a serious challenge given the data communications technology of the day.   using smaller computers with built in frame buffers side-stepped this problem.  
i seem to recall reading (long ago) an interview with an early adopter of networked workstation for software development who said that the driving factor was predictable compile compile times (which came at cost of poorer hardware utilization) that made planning and managing projects much more systematic.  
i also wonder if there was a "fashion factor".  it became the way folks did things for a while.  and users who had their own box at one job (or in college lab) and went on to another job wanted the same thing there too.  
so i suspect there may have been more considerations than are currently mentioned.  Ericfluger 19:56, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  incentives to use workstations 

message: while it can be hard to say what's a workstation and what isn't, i think it's safe to say there's a distiction to be made between a workstation and thin client FROM A FUNCTIONAL STANDPOINT.
as far as i can tell, workstations generally provide "local applications processing".   thin clients don't. 
viewed from a hardware-only perspective things get a bit dicier.  in some cases the same machine can be configured as either a workstation or a thin client.  (sun's only x-terminal was based on entry level workstation hardware.  PCs can be configured to work as thin clients in various ways.) 
the sun ray ultra thin clients mentioned in the article are clearly not workstations.  no workstation hardware, software, or functionality.   while sun's new-ish scalable back end graphic technology may now make replacing workstations with thin clients feasable and even attractive, that still doesn't make the thin client "workstation-like".  
i suspect it may be best to mention this alternative and link to a separate article rather than explore it in depth. 
Ericfluger 19:55, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  thin clients and workstations 

message: Does the phrase "server-level processor" have any objective commonly-accepted meaning in the industry or is it just vacuous PC-magazine-speak? As I recall, every microprocessor chip introduced since the 8085 was said to be "far too powerful for personal computer use and only suitable for servers".  Servers...file servers..,don't even need to do floating-point maths.  I'm taking it out. --Wtshymanski (talk) 04:44, 27 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Server level processor usually refers to Xeon and Opteron processors. It also refers to pure server processors such as the Sun UltraSPARC and IBM POWER. As for all servers not needing floating point mathematics, server simply refers to a computer that serves a client. A file server is just a type of server, not definitive of. As for the 8085 "being far too powerful for personal computing and suitable only for servers" please provide a reliable source for that. Back in those days, servers were built on VAX and other proprietary processors. Mainframes too, were big then. If I am not mistaken, the 8085 was for a terminal that connected to a mainframe. Rilak (talk) 08:41, 27 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Processor

message: My background with workstations goes back to 1984 and Sun.  Back then there was a clear distinction between PCs and workstations.  These days I don't believe the distinction exists anymore.  Back in the 80's I think the four main requirements of a workstation were that it meet the 3M_computer requirements: a MIPS, a Mega-pixel and a Megabyte, that it would run a multitasking operating system, that it have at least a 17" bitmap display, and that it was connected to a high speed network.  Now it happens, at that time most of the machines that met this spec ran a flavor of UNIX, used a window systems, X became the standard, and used TCP/IP and Ethernet for their network connection.  The 3M computer dividing line held up until the late 80's and early 90's.  While in the late 80's/early 90's the hardware specs of a workstation had increased by more than an order of magnitude, the typical mid-range PC was just starting to meet the 3M spec.
But in the 90's as hardware performance increased, Ethernet and TCP/IP became the standard of for all computers and Mega-pixel large screen displays became affordable the 3M computer differences no longer were that great.  A typical high end PC had similar hardware specifications as a typical workstation.  And the price difference was typically an a factor of 4 to 10.  This is why most hardware vendors either got out of or dramatically scaled back in the workstation market.  Yes, you could still buy them but they were very high end machines used for very specific tasks.  Different types of CAD mainly.  Graphics intensive applications could be usually be done on a high end PC.
The last hurtle to overcome was the multitasking operating system.  This happened in the late 90's.  Linux and UNIX running on Intel hardware became solid and achieved a production level of quality.  Also with Microsoft's introduction of Windows NT, the Microsoft world finally had a true multitasking operating system.  So the high-end software vendors started porting their software to the Intel architecture, either UNIX/Linux or Windows NT.  This was the death knell for the workstation as a distinct class of machine.  For me personally the switch happened in the 97-98 time frame when I switched my Sun workstation for a Linux PC.  At this time I changed my thinking about workstations to thinking of them as plain desk top computers.  I think this change had been happening for a while.  So to me at least the term "workstation" seems like an archaic term like the term "mini-computer".  Yes there are still a few mini-computers made, the IBM AS/400 (System 1 now) comes to mind.  But if some one is describing a need for new computer as needing a mini-computer, I would think that they had a need to run legacy applications.  If you were thinking of running current multi-user applications you would host it on a server, not a mini-computer.  Likewise there are still people buying workstations, but I suspect that it is mainly to run legacy applications on legacy CPU architectures.
Workstations were great while they lasted, but I am glad that a typical desk top PC has a very similar user experience as a workstation used to.
Robert.harker (talk) 00:45, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Umm no. Current technical applications such as CATIA and many 3D graphics applications (Maya and Max) still run on workstations. Granted, the architectures are not as distinctive as they once were, but workstations are still going strong. Such an example would be the Boxx Apexx 8, with eight quad-core Opterons and 128 GB of memory. Workstations are no where near obsolete. Rilak (talk) 07:02, 11 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Workstation is an outdated term 

message: I strongly oppose this suggestion. One of the definitions of "desktop" is any computer whose size and weight permits it to be placed on a desk, as opposed to a "deskside" computer which is too large and heavy. A workstation, however, can be of any size. Old IBM POWERstations, based on the POWER1 and POWER2 processors were huge (for a workstation) deskside machines, if I recall correctly. Further more, a workstation is not a term used to describe size - it is a term used to describe, historically, a computer intended to be used by a single person that is based on a RISC architecture, and currently a computer: 1) specialized for a certain technical or scientific task or 2) significantly more powerful than a commodity computer of its era. Merging it with desktop, which has no connection to workstations other than some workstations being a desktops, seems to me, rather pointless and to be honest - silly. Rilak (talk) 10:24, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge to [[desktop computer]] 

message: I mentionned the emergence of blade workstations which are beeing pushed forward by IBM and HP as an option similar to current and past workstations. IBM solution is really poor in terms of capacity as of now.
Sun visualization system is akin to these solutions, thought it is based on traditional servers, and more in line with traditional client/server solutions. Anyone want to comment on the Out of scope nature of it. I cannot make up my mind... --Dwarfpower (talk) 07:42, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Blade workstation and sun visualization System 

message: I think this article needs some major work to improve the presentation of all classes of computers that are or have been termed a "workstation". The problem is that workstations have been referred to many classes of computers. In the past, they were not based on, or are personal computers, if the definition of personal computers is a single-user microcomputer for use by "average users". This is my primary concern. Workstations are not average user-orientated machines, some workstation vendors in the past sold workstations only to businesses and other large organizations, not individuals. Stating that workstations run technical and scientific applications doesn't help. I run technical applications on my PC, and that same application has a port to HP-UX on PA-RISC and Solaris on SPARC. At present, the article uses the mid-1990s definition, a single-user microcomputer. This is not the case today as they are nothing more than PCs. So, that said, should the article be rewritten to address the present definition of a workstation, with the historical definitions regulated to subsections or should the article be split into multiple articles for each? Rilak (talk) 10:27, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article rewrite? 

message: The article said that: Alternative UNIX based platforms are provided by Apple Inc., Sun Microsystems, and SGI. But AFAIK SGI nowadays only have Windows and Linux, so I think SGI should be deleted from this phrase. AFAIK only proprietary UNIXes supplied by vendors in their workstations are MacOSX in Apple MacPro and Solaris in Sun Ultra 27 (both on them on Intel Xeon, x86-64 architecture)
--ManoloKosh (talk) 20:49, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Alternative UNIX based platforms 

message: ** Is Apple a workstation manufacturer at all? No real engineering/scientific apps for this platform, and Mac Pro itself is rather a toy (computer for graphics/audio/video production) not a workstation (computer for real scientific/engineering work)... maybe remove MacPro picture from article?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.219.166.17 (talk) 20:21, 17 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mac workstation 

message: There is a lot of energized Talk history to take in and digest. I’m not looking to push a controversial position. I was involved with workstations from the mid 80s to the mid 90s. We even had a TI Explorer LISP machine. (Sidenote for younger editors, we didn’t have podcasts but we did have TI sponsored interactive lectures re AI by satellite link…still have the VHS). 
What do people think about some *very modest* inclusion/expansion regarding what workstations were used for and why they were important? I’d appreciate your thoughts.
The current brief list of applications is indicative but doesn’t give much flavor or provide the context for adding many wikilinks. 
For example, preceding desktop publishing, workstations were transformative for the prepress/typesetting industry with companies such as Interleaf, Compugraphics, Bitstream, and perhaps a few others. 
Workstations made real-time parametric modeling possible (reference companies such as PTC/Pro-E), which literally multiplied the productivity of design and manufacturing engineers, not just for designing parts but with auto-routing tools for laying out the wiring and plumbing, etc., of complex buildings and production facilities.
Workstations were pivotal for the emergence of industrial-scale document imaging; using early workstations, companies such as FileNet enabled industries such as insurance and banking to virtualize their document storage and retrieval, leading to some fairly radical shifts in customer service models. (e.g., USAA no longer needed a vast warehouse of bankers boxes and could offer customer service by phone across all time zones; others followed.) (PCs using dedicated image processing cards supplanted the pricy workstations, but it took several years.) 
One particularly noteworthy impact of workstations was their effect on the supercomputer industry. Interacting with Cray staff, I recall their confidence that workstations would not undermine their market. How wrong they were. Within months, budget expenditures were being shifted from buying time on the Crays to buying Apollo and other workstations. (Note there is a small matter that acquisition could be capitalized while time was just expensed.) The last step in this process was Silicon Graphics' acquisition of Cray. Ref:
:The Shrinking Supercomputer 
:Supercomputer Decline Topples Cray Computer 
:SILICON GRAPHICS TO ACQUIRE CRAY IN $740 MILLION DEAL 
Workstations formed a crucial technical/capability bridge in the 80s and 90s as part of the era of downsizing and distributing computing resources (and their control) away from centralized computing hardware and organizations. They gave departments more flexibility to adjust resources, justify expenditures, etc. 
Putting aside my particular examples, do people agree that the particular roles of workstations and their significance in the history of computing could use some selective enhancement? 
While some points would fit under in subsection of History, a convenient starting point for mentioning something like prepress (Interleaf, Compugraphics) might be under Market Position where Avid (non-linear editing) is already mentioned. Zatsugaku (talk) 18:55, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  What they were used for and why they were important