Whatever Happened to Unix Workstations?

In the ’80s and early ’90s, powerful Unix workstations dominated technical tasks like science and 3D animation. Let’s find out where they went and where you can still find them today.

What Were Unix Workstations?

Unix workstations were powerful computers that ran some variant of Unix. As the name implies, they were meant for serious work such as software development, CAD, or graphics. They were widely used by scientists, engineers, researchers, and computer animators in academia and industry.

Sun Microsystems, HP, and Silicon Graphics were some of the biggest manufacturers of workstations in that era. Unix was popular on these systems because it was easier than writing a system from scratch and the source code was available, even if it was at a steep price. Developers were also familiar with Unix from their college days.

This clip from 1987 shows how workstations were heavily used for 3D graphics back then:

Wow, a whole four megabytes!

Workstations had larger monitors with higher resolutions than PCs at the time, which was important for the graphically intensive work they were used for. They also had more memory and faster processors. Workstations were early adopters of RISC processors for higher performance, like the SPARC or MIPS architectures.

Workstation History

Before workstations arrived on the scene, it was minicomputers that served most computer users. Minicomputers (not to be confused with mini PCs), were computers that were smaller than mainframes but still typically shared with mutiple users, popular for things like smaller scientific computations, software development, and factory automation. While minicomputers were occasionally dedicated to a single user, this was rare, as minis were generally considered too expensive to do so.

A precursor to the workstation as a standalone computer intended for one user at a time was the Xerox Alto, a prototype from the 1970s that pioneered the graphical user interface. While it was never offered for sale, it also inspired the development of the Apple Macintosh.

The Three Rivers PERQ was the first modern workstation, a single-user computer with the power of a minicomputer in a personal form factor intended for scientific and engineering work.

The first Unix workstation was the SUN board created by Andy Bechtolsheim at Stanford. Sun Microsystems later commercialized it. Other workstations came on the market, such as the famous Silicon Graphics line of systems. These systems were used for technical tasks such as software development, CAD/CAM, and 3D animation, including movies like “Jurassic Park” and “Toy Story.”

Workstations and PCs Merge

As early as 1989, observers in the computer industry were noticing that with the increasing power of personal computers, the workstation and PC markets were starting to blur, according to Byte magazine.

The Intel 386 chip made multitasking PC operating systems viable in the PC market, but the software base, still rooted in MS-DOS, was trying to catch up to the hardware. Unix was multitasking and could be ported easily to new hardware, so observers in the computer world thought that Unix could unseat MS-DOS as an OS of choice for a new range of “personal workstations.”

While workstations were aimed at engineers and scientists, they still needed to run business applications alongside technical software. An engineer might need to write a report in a word processor or budget a project in a spreadsheet, and these applications were hard to find on Unix workstations. Or a user might need to exchange documents with someone on a PC.

If a workstation user had enough desk space or a large enough budget, you might have found a PC sitting next to the workstation for office tasks. The cheaper alternative for this problem was a software compatibility layer, similar to WINE on modern systems. VP/IX and MERGE were popular programs for running DOS on PC Unix systems. Other solutions involved PC boards that plugged into a slot on the system.

Can You Still Buy a Workstation Today?

As PCs got even more powerful during the ’90s, the workstation and PC markets have merged even further, where it’s hard to tell the two apart. Windows NT came on the scene and allowed technical users to run technical and business apps together, and Linux on PCs took over from commercial Unix workstations for many scientific users at the same time. Gamers adopted large displays and 3D accelerators that had been the domain of workstations.

Still, it’s possible to buy a workstation if you know where to look. Today, they run the same processors and use the same cards and peripherals that ordinary PCs do, but are often engineered for high performance and reliability. Popular options include the Dell Precision, Hp Z series, and Apple Mac Pro. macOS and Linux aren’t wholly descended from the original Unix, but are instead influenced enough to be “Unix-like.”

Manufacturers and OS makers are keeping the flame of ’80s and ’90s Unix workstations alive.