A workstation is a computer equipment that is used in a professional activity.
To understand what the concept of workstation refers to, it is useful to first focus on the terms that make up the expression. Station is a notion with several meanings: in this case we are interested in its meaning as the set of facilities that are used to carry out certain tasks. Work , on the other hand, is the exercise of a trade or profession or the development of a paid activity.
Although this is the meaning of the term work that we usually use in everyday speech, in this case it refers to "that which results from the activity of the human being" or to "the operation of the tool, piece, utensil or machine that is used for a specific purpose.
What is a workstation
Returning to the idea of a workstation , we can affirm that it is computer equipment that is intended for professional, technical or scientific work . The workstation, also known as a workstation by its name in English, is usually a computer (a computer) with advanced features that is connected to different peripherals (printers, scanners, etc.) and is part of a network .
Typically, a workstation is linked to other computers and a server . This makes it easier to work as a team, sharing resources and data.
In an office there can be many workstations.
Differences with a home computer
It is important to mention that, although there were previously important technical differences between a home computer and a workstation, these distances have been shortened, especially in certain areas. It must be taken into account that the most advanced workstation from a few decades ago provided fewer features than a current PC that anyone uses to study or play.
In any case, in those sectors where high processing speed and the ability to work with immense amounts of data are required, workstations continue to be special equipment with outstanding qualities.
History of the workstation
Although it is not possible to unequivocally determine which was the first workstation in history, many experts assure that the most suitable candidate was the IBM 1620 , a computer for scientific use that was introduced on the market in 1959. A Unlike the norm at that time, this equipment was designed to be operated by a single user .
Another thing that differentiated this workstation from the devices of that time is that it did not have any kind of real arithmetic circuit , which is why it required the user to store in the main memory a table with the mathematical rules of addition to perform this operation. . This was not a design error, but rather it allowed production costs to be saved and, therefore, the equipment to be sold at a more affordable price.
It is important to note that some companies did not buy the workstation but rather rented it, and for this they paid up to $1,000 per month. Later, IBM introduced the model 1130 to the market, while the American company DEC presented its PDP-8 minicomputer . Starting in the 1970s, microcomputer-based workstations arrived, with examples such as the Lisp machine , the Xerox Alto , the PERQ , and the Xerox Star .
In the following decade, workstations based on the Motorola 68000 processor began to appear, marketed by companies such as SGI, Sun Microsystems and Apollo Computer . Starting in the second half of the 1980s, the dominant CPU was the RISC , whose name is the acronym for Reduced Instruction Set Computer. These computers typically included a version of the processor and a UNIX-derived operating system designed by the manufacturers themselves.