Workstation

[2] Intended primarily to be used by a single user,[2] they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems.

[5] Workstations formerly offered higher performance than mainstream personal computers, especially in CPU, graphics, memory, and multitasking.

Because of their minicomputer heritage, from the start workstations have run professional and expensive software such as CAD and graphics design, as opposed to PCs' games and text editors.

[8] 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.

The first computer designed for a single user, with high-resolution graphics (and so a workstation in the modern sense), is the Alto developed at Xerox PARC in 1973.

In the early 1980s, with the advent of 32-bit microprocessors such as the Motorola 68000, several new competitors appeared, including Apollo Computer and Sun Microsystems,[17] with workstations based on 68000 and Unix.

Many workstations by then had some method to run increasingly popular and powerful PC software such as Lotus 1-2-3 or Microsoft Word.

[23] Workstations often featured SCSI or Fibre Channel disk storage systems, high-end 3D accelerators, single or multiple 64-bit processors,[24] large amounts of RAM, and well-designed cooling.

Workstations diversified to the lowest possible price point as opposed to performance, called the thin client or network computer.

Some diskless nodes still run a traditional operating system and perform computations locally, with storage on a remote server.

[27] However, traditional workstations and PCs continued to drop in price and complexity as remote management tools for IT staff became available, undercutting this market.

[28] RFC 782 defines the workstation environment more generally as "hardware and software dedicated to serve a single user", and that it provisions additional shared resources.

Other features beyond the typical personal computer include networking, graphics acceleration, and high-speed internal and peripheral data buses.

"In an era when many professionals preferred Silicon Graphics workstations, the Quadra 700 was an intriguing option at a fraction of the cost" as resource-intensive software such as Infini-D brought "studio-quality 3D rendering and animations to the home desktop".

The multicore design was pioneered by IBM's POWER4; it and Intel Xeon have multiple CPUs, more on-die cache, and ECC memory.

[37][38] In October of 2024 System 76 introduces The Thelio Astra an Arm workstation aim for autonomous car industry.