Workstations

[Fact 1]: The certification process makes the workstation's price jump several notches but for professional purposes, reliability is more important than the initial purchase cost.Perhaps the first computer that might qualify as a "workstation" was the IBM 1620, a small scientific computer designed to be used interactively by a single person sitting at the console.

[Fact 2]: Both of these systems came with the ability to run programs written in Fortran and other languages.

[Fact 3]: One peculiar feature of the machine was that it lacked any actual arithmetic circuitry.

[Fact 4]: However, the line between workstation and PC is increasingly becoming blurred as the demand for fast computers, networking and graphics have become common in the consumer world, allowing workstation manufacturers to use "off the shelf" PC components and graphics solutions as opposed to proprietary in-house developed technology.

[Fact 5]: Since many of the components are now the same as those used in the consumer market, the price differential between the lower end workstation and consumer PCs may be narrower than it once was.

[Fact 6]: It was introduced in 1959.

[Fact 7]: Additionally, workstations, given their more specialized nature, tend to have higher profit margins than commodity-driven PCs.The systems that come out of workstation companies often feature SCSI or Fibre Channel disk storage systems, high-end 3D accelerators, single or multiple 64-bit processors, large amounts of RAM, and well-designed cooling.

[Fact 8]: Because workstations are designed for high-end tasks such as weather forecasting, video rendering, and game design, it's taken for granted that these systems must be running under full-load, non-stop for several hours or even days without issue.

[Fact 9]: This saved on the cost of logic circuitry, enabling IBM to make it inexpensive.

[Fact 10]: By the mid-1990s, some x86 CPUs had achieved performance on a parity with RISC in some areas, such as integer performance , high resolutions, high refresh rate were common among PCs by the late 1990s, although in the late 1980s and early 1990s, this was rare.

High-performance 3D graphics hardware: this started to become increasingly popular in the PC market around the mid-to-late 1990s, mostly driven by computer gaming, although workstations featured better quality, sometimes sacrificing performance.

High performance/high capacity data storage: early workstations tended to use proprietary disk interfaces until the emergence of the SCSI standard in the mid-1980s.