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83-457: The Xerox Star workstation , officially named Xerox Star 8010 Information System , is the first commercial personal computer to incorporate technologies that have since become standard in personal computers, including a bitmapped display, a window-based graphical user interface , icons , folders , mouse (two-button), Ethernet networking , file servers , print servers , and email . Introduced by Xerox Corporation on April 27, 1981,

166-602: A de facto standard networking protocol. Some people said that Apple, Microsoft, and others plagiarized the GUI and other innovations from the Xerox Star, and believe that Xerox didn't properly protect its intellectual property. Many patent disclosures were submitted for the innovations in the Star. However, at the time, the 1975 Xerox Consent Decree, a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) antitrust action, placed restrictions on what

249-503: A $ 12,000 (equivalent to $ 29,000 in 2023) "personal workstation" might be a high-end PC like Macintosh II or IBM PS/2 Model 80 , low-end workstation, or a hybrid device like the NeXT Computer , all with similar, overlapping specifications. One differentiator between PC and workstation was that the latter was much more likely to have a graphics accelerator with support for a graphics standard like PHIGS or X Window , while

332-458: A VAX-11 /750, which cost five times more. The 17 in (43 cm) cathode-ray tube (CRT) display (black and white, 1024×808 pixels with 38.7 Hz refresh) is large for the time. It can display two 8.5×11 in pages side by side in true size. The overscan area (borders) can be programmed with a 16×16 repeating pattern, to extend the root window pattern to all the edges of the monitor. The D-Star machines were commercialized as: The Xerox Star

415-586: A few universities to which Xerox had donated some Altos. Mesa was later adopted as the systems programming language for Xerox's commercial workstations such as the Xerox 8010 (Xerox Star, Dandelion) and Xerox 6085 (Daybreak) , in particular for the Pilot operating system . A secondary development environment, called the Xerox Development Environment (XDE) allowed developers to debug both

498-411: A megapixel display (roughly 1000×1000 pixels), and one " MegaFLOPS " compute performance (at least one million floating-point operations per second). 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. This is at least one order of magnitude beyond the capacity of the personal computer of

581-950: A much higher price. Workstations have typically driven advancements in CPU technology. All computers benefit from multi-processor and multicore designs (essentially, multiple processors on a die ). The multicore design was pioneered by IBM's POWER4 ; it and Intel Xeon have multiple CPUs, more on-die cache, and ECC memory. Some workstations are designed or certified for use with only one specific application such as AutoCAD , Avid Xpress Studio HD, or 3D Studio Max . The certification process increases workstation prices. Modern workstations are typically desktop computers with AMD or NVIDIA GPUs to do high-performance computing on software programs such as video editing , 3D modeling , computer-aided design , and rendering . By January 2009, all RISC -based workstation product lines had been discontinued: In early 2018, RISC workstations were reintroduced in

664-448: A new, faster processor, and accompanied by significant rewriting of the Star software, renamed ViewPoint, to improve performance. The new system was released in 1985. The new hardware provided 1 MB to 4 MB of memory, a 10 MB to 80 MB hard disk, a 15" or 19" display, a 5.25" floppy drive, a mouse, Ethernet connection and a price of a little over $ 6,000 . The Xerox 6085 could be sold along with an attached laser printer as

747-509: A personal workstation suitable for 2D CAD costing $ 5,000 (equivalent to $ 12,000 in 2023) to $ 25,000 (equivalent to $ 61,000 in 2023) was available from multiple vendors. Mid-range models capable of 3D graphics cost from $ 35,000 (equivalent to $ 86,000 in 2023) to $ 60,000 (equivalent to $ 147,000 in 2023), while high-end models overlapping with minicomputers cost from $ 80,000 (equivalent to $ 197,000 in 2023) to $ 100,000 (equivalent to $ 246,000 in 2023) or more. By then

830-594: A practice which was incorporated in PARC's standard programming style. On the other hand, the availability of the left-pointing arrow allowed them to use it for the assignment operator, as it originally had been in ALGOL. When the Mesa designers wanted to implement an exception facility, they hired a recent M.Sc. graduate from Colorado who had written his thesis on exception handling facilities in algorithmic languages. This led to

913-661: A series of IBM POWER9 -based systems by Raptor Computing Systems. In October of 2024 System 76 introduces The Thelio Astra an Arm workstation aim for autonomous car industry. Most of the current workstation market uses x86-64 microprocessors. Operating systems include Windows , FreeBSD , Linux distributions , macOS , and Solaris . Some vendors also market commodity mono-socket systems as workstations. These are three types of workstations: A high-end desktop market segment includes workstations, with PC operating systems and components. Component product lines may be segmented, with premium components that are functionally similar to

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996-616: A server (with RS232 I/O), and a floor-standing laser printer. The server software includes a File Server, a Print Server, and distributed services (Mail Server, Clearinghouse Name Server / Directory, and Authentication Server). Xerox Memorywriter typewriters connect to this system over Ethernet and send email, using the Memorywriter as a teletype . The Star was developed at Xerox's Systems Development Department (SDD) in El Segundo, California , which had been established in 1977 under

1079-475: A similar role for technical computing. Sun's thin clients include the Sun Ray product line. However, traditional workstations and PCs continued to drop in price and complexity as remote management tools for IT staff became available, undercutting this market. A high-end workstation of the early 1980s with the three Ms, or a "3M computer" (coined by Raj Reddy and his colleagues at CMU), has one megabyte of RAM,

1162-402: A single person sitting at the console. It was introduced in 1959. One peculiar feature of the machine is that it lacks any arithmetic circuitry. To perform addition, it requires a memory-resident table of decimal addition rules. This reduced the cost of logic circuitry, enabling IBM to make it inexpensive. The machine is codenamed CADET and was initially rented for $ 1000 per month. In 1965,

1245-620: A standalone system. Also offered was a PC compatibility mode via an 80186-based expansion board. Users could transfer files between the ViewPoint system and PC-based software, albeit with some difficulty because the file formats were incompatible with any on the PC. But even with a significantly lower price, it was still a Rolls-Royce in the world of lower cost $ 2,000 personal computers. In 1989, Viewpoint 2.0 introduced many new applications related to desktop publishing . Eventually, Xerox jettisoned

1328-423: A traditional operating system and perform computations locally, with storage on a remote server . These are intended to reduce the initial system purchase cost, and the total cost of ownership , by reducing the amount of administration required per user. This approach was first attempted as a replacement for PCs in office productivity applications, with the 3Station by 3Com . In the 1990s, X terminals filled

1411-423: A window. Users do not start programs first (such as a text editor, graphics program, or spreadsheet software), but simply open the file and the appropriate application appears. The Star user interface is based on the concept of objects. For example, a word processing document holds page objects, paragraph objects, sentence objects, word objects, and character objects. The user selects objects by clicking on them with

1494-460: A workstation for Interlisp or Smalltalk, and a server. Some have said that the Star was ahead of its time, that few outside of a small circle of developers really understood the potential of the system, considering that IBM introduced its 8088-based IBM PC running the comparatively primitive PC DOS the same year as the Star. However, comparison with the IBM PC may be irrelevant: well before it

1577-684: A workstation in the modern sense), is the Alto developed at Xerox PARC in 1973. Other early workstations include the Terak 8510/a (1977), Three Rivers PERQ (1979), and the later Xerox Star (1981). 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 , with workstations based on 68000 and Unix . Meanwhile, DARPA 's VLSI Project created several spinoff graphics products, such as

1660-462: Is a programming convention used to implement object-oriented capabilities and multiple inheritance in the customer environment of Star and Viewpoint. The Star team used a sophisticated integrated development environment (IDE), codenamed Tajo and externally named Xerox Development Environment (XDE). Tajo has many similarities with the Smalltalk -80 environment, but has many added tools, such as

1743-480: Is loaded to implement an instruction set designed for Mesa. It was possible to load microcode for the Interlisp or Smalltalk environments, but these three environments can not run at the same time. The Dolphin (aka D0), built with transistor-transistor logic (TTL) technology, included 74S181 ALUs. It was intended to be the Star workstation, but its cost was deemed too high for the project goals. The complexity of

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1826-517: Is what you get" ( WYSIWYG ) was considered paramount. Text is displayed as black on a white background, just like paper, and the printer replicates the screen using Interpress , a page description language developed at PARC. One of the main designers of the Star, Dr. David Canfield Smith , invented the concept of computer icons and the desktop metaphor, in which the user sees a desktop containing documents and folders, with different icons representing different types of documents. Clicking any icon opens

1909-531: The BEGIN and END keywords rather than braces . In Mesa, all keywords are written in uppercase. Due to PARC's using the 1963 variant of ASCII rather than the more common 1967 variant, the Alto's character set included a left-pointing arrow (←) rather than an underscore. The result of this is that Alto programmers (including those using Mesa, Smalltalk etc.) conventionally used camelCase for compound identifiers,

1992-741: The Cedar programming language. Many Mesa programmers and developers left Xerox in 1985; some of them went to DEC Systems Research Center where they used their experience with Mesa in the design of Modula-2+ , and later of Modula-3 . Mesa was a strongly typed programming language with type-checking across module boundaries, but with enough flexibility in its type system that heap allocators could be written in Mesa. Due to its strict separation between interface and implementation, Mesa allows true incremental compilation and encourages architecture - and platform -independent programming. They also simplified source-level debugging , including remote debugging via

2075-534: The Ethernet . Mesa had rich exception handling facilities, with four types of exceptions. It had support for thread synchronization via monitors. Mesa was the first language to implement monitor BROADCAST, a concept introduced by the Pilot operating system. Mesa has an "imperative" and "algebraic" syntax , based on ALGOL and Pascal rather than on BCPL or C ; for instance, compound commands are indicated by

2158-455: The IBM 1130 scientific computer became the successor to 1620. Both of these systems run Fortran and other languages. They are built into roughly desk-sized cabinets, with console typewriters. They have optional add-on disk drives, printers, and both paper-tape and punched-card I/O. Early workstations were generally dedicated minicomputers , a multiuser system reserved for one user. For example,

2241-455: The Lisa , Macintosh , Graphics Environment Manager (GEM), Visi On , Windows , Atari ST , BTRON from TRON Project , Amiga , Elixir Desktop, Metaphor Computer Systems , Interleaf , OS/2 , OPEN LOOK (co-developed by Xerox), SunView , KDE , Ventura Publisher , and NEXTSTEP . Adobe Systems PostScript was based on Interpress . Ethernet was further refined by 3Com , and has become

2324-559: The NLS computer system at the Stanford Research Institute and PLATO at University of Illinois. At first, only a few Altos had been built. Although by 1979 nearly 1,000 Ethernet-linked Altos had been put into operation at Xerox and another 500 at collaborating universities and government offices, it was never intended to be a commercial product. Then in 1977, Xerox started a development project which worked to incorporate

2407-573: The OpenDoc software platform in the late 1990s, and in the AppleWorks (originally ClarisWorks) package for the Macintosh in 1991 and Windows in 1993. Initially, the Star software was to run on a new series of virtual-memory processors. The D* (pronounced D-Star) series of machines has names beginning with that letter. They are all microprogrammed processors; for the Star software, microcode

2490-618: The PDP-8 from Digital Equipment Corporation , is regarded as the first commercial minicomputer. Workstations have historically been more advanced than contemporary PCs, with more powerful CPU architectures, earlier networking, more advanced graphics, more memory, and multitasking with sophisticated operating systems like Unix. 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. The Lisp machines developed at MIT in

2573-516: The Silicon Graphics 3130 . Target markets were differentiated, with Sun and Apollo considered to be network workstations and SGI as graphics workstations. RISC CPUs increased in the mid-1980s, typical of workstation vendors. Competition between RISC vendors lowered CPU prices to as little as $ 10 per MIPS, much less expensive than the Intel 80386 ; after large price cuts in 1987 and 1988,

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2656-453: The form factor is that of a desktop computer , which consists of a high-resolution display, a keyboard , and a mouse at a minimum, but also offers multiple displays, graphics tablets , and 3D mice for manipulating objects and navigating scenes. Workstations were the first segment of the computer market to present advanced accessories, and collaboration tools like videoconferencing . The increasing capabilities of mainstream PCs since

2739-569: The version control system DF, which requires programmers to check out modules before they are changed. Any change in a module which force changes in dependent modules are closely tracked and documented. Changes to lower level modules require various levels of approval. The software development process was intense. It involved much prototyping and user testing. The software engineers had to develop new network communications protocols and data-encoding schemes when those used in PARC's research environment proved inadequate. Initially, all development

2822-522: The Alto innovations into a commercial product; their concept was an integrated document preparation system, centered on the expensive laser printing technology and targeted at large corporations and their trading partners. When the resulting Star system was announced in 1981, the cost was about US$ 75,000 (equivalent to $ 251,000 in 2023) for a basic system, and US$ 16,000 (equivalent to $ 54,000 in 2023) for each added workstation. A base system includes an 8010 Star workstation, and an 8010 dedicated as

2905-523: The Dandelion, with more microcode space, was dubbed Dandetiger. The base Dandelion system has 384  KB memory (expandable to 1.5 MB), a 10 MB, 29 MB or 40 MB 8" hard drive, an 8" floppy drive , mouse, and Ethernet . The performance of this machine, which sold for US$ 20,000 (equivalent to $ 67,000 in 2023), is about 850 in the Dhrystone benchmark — comparable to that of

2988-492: The Macintosh user interface in Windows, Xerox filed a similar lawsuit against Apple. However, this suit was dismissed on procedural grounds, not substantive, because a three-year statute of limitations had passed. In 1994, Apple lost its suit against Microsoft, not only the issues originally contested, but all claims to the user interface. On January 15, 2019, a work-in-progress Star emulator created by LCM+L known as Darkstar

3071-637: 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 Quadra 700 can run A/UX 3.0, making it a Unix workstation. Another example is the Nvidia GeForce 256 consumer graphics card, which spawned the Quadro workstation card, which has the same GPU but different driver support and certifications for CAD applications and

3154-613: The Star product failed in the market, it raised expectations and laid important groundwork for later computers. Many of the innovations behind the Star, such as WYSIWYG editing, Ethernet , and network services such as directory, print, file, and internetwork routing have become commonplace in computers. Members of the Lisa engineering team saw Star at its introduction at the National Computer Conference (NCC '81) and returned to Cupertino where they converted their desktop manager to an icon-based interface modeled on

3237-795: The Star. Among the developers of Xerox's Gypsy WYSIWYG editor, Larry Tesler left Xerox to join Apple in 1980 where he also developed the MacApp framework. Charles Simonyi left Xerox to join Microsoft in 1981 where he developed first WYSIWYG version of Microsoft Word (3.0) . In 1983, Simonyi recommended Scott A. McGregor , who was recruited by Bill Gates to lead the development of Windows 1.0 , in part for McGregor's experience in windowing systems at PARC. Later that year, several others left PARC to join Microsoft. Star, Viewpoint, and GlobalView were

3320-449: The companies that make the products tend to have comprehensive repair/replacement plans. As the distinction between workstation and PC fades, however, workstation manufacturers have increasingly employed "off-the-shelf" PC components and graphics solutions rather than proprietary hardware or software. Some "low-cost" workstations are still expensive by PC standards but offer binary compatibility with higher-end workstations and servers made by

3403-542: The consumer models but with higher robustness or performance. A workstation-class PC may have some of the following features: Mesa (programming language) Mesa is a programming language developed in the mid 1970s at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in Palo Alto, California , United States . The language name was a pun based upon the programming language catchphrases of

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3486-464: The definitions. The Mesa compiler type-checks all uses of imported entities; this combination of separate compilation with type-checking was unusual at the time. Mesa introduced several other innovations in language design and implementation, notably in the handling of software exceptions , thread synchronization , and incremental compilation . Mesa was developed on the Xerox Alto , one of

3569-537: The development arm of PARC), tuned up the instruction set and published a paper on the resultant code density. Mesa was taught via the Mesa Programming Course that took people through the wide range of technology Xerox had available at the time and ended with the programmer writing a " hack ", a workable program designed to be useful. An actual example of such a hack is the BWSMagnifier, which

3652-405: The direction of Don Massaro. SDD North was located in Palo Alto, California , including some people borrowed from PARC. SDD's mission was to design the " Office of the future ", a new system to incorporate the best features of the Alto, have ease of use, and to automate many office tasks. The development team was headed by David Liddle , and grew to more than 200 developers. Much of the first year

3735-531: The early 1970s pioneered some workstation principles, as high-performance, networked, single-user systems intended for heavily interactive use. Lisp Machines were commercialized beginning 1980 by companies like Symbolics , Lisp Machines , Texas Instruments (the TI Explorer ), and Xerox (the Interlisp-D workstations). The first computer designed for a single user, with high-resolution graphics (and so

3818-449: The early 2000s, this difference largely disappeared, since workstations use highly commoditized hardware dominated by large PC vendors, such as Dell , Hewlett-Packard , and Fujitsu , selling x86-64 systems running Windows or Linux . Workstations are older than the first personal computer (PC). The first computer that might qualify as a workstation is the IBM 1620 , a small scientific computer designed to be used interactively by

3901-491: The firm was able to patent . Also, when the Star disclosures were being prepared, the Xerox patent attorneys were busy with several other new technologies such as laser printing. Finally, patents on software, particularly those relating to user interfaces, were then an untested legal area. Xerox went to trial to protect the Star user interface. In 1989, after Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp. for copyright infringement of

3984-552: The first personal computers with a graphical user interface , however, most of the Alto's system software was written in BCPL . Mesa was the system programming language of the later Xerox Star workstations, and for the GlobalView desktop environment. Xerox PARC later developed Cedar , which was a superset of Mesa. Mesa and Cedar had a major influence on the design of other important languages, such as Modula-2 and Java , and

4067-453: The first commercial computing environments to offer support for most natural languages , including full-featured word processing, leading to their adoption by the Voice of America , other United States foreign affairs agencies, and several multinational corporations. The list of products that were inspired or influenced by the user interface of the Star, and to a lesser extent the Alto, include

4150-421: The former usually depended on software rendering or proprietary accelerators. The computer animation industry's needs typically caused improvements in graphical technology, with CAD using the same improvements later. BYTE predicted in 1989 "Soon, the only way we'll be able to tell the difference between traditional workstations and PCs will be by the operating system they run", with the former running Unix and

4233-426: The integrated hardware/software workstation offered by Viewpoint and offered a software-only product called GlobalView , providing the Star interface and technology on an IBM PC compatible platform. The initial release required installing a Mesa CPU add-on board. The final release of GlobalView 2.1 in 1996 ran as an emulator on Solaris , Microsoft Windows 3.1 , Windows 95 , or Windows 98 , and OS/2 . Even though

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4316-468: The late 1990s have reduced distinction between the PCs and workstations. Typical 1980s workstations have expensive proprietary hardware and operating systems to categorically distinguish from standardized PCs. From the 1990s and 2000s, IBM 's RS/6000 and IntelliStation have RISC -based POWER CPUs running AIX , and its IBM PC Series and Aptiva corporate and consumer PCs have Intel x86 CPUs. However, by

4399-598: The latter running OS/2 , classic Mac OS , and/or 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 . The magazine demonstrated that year that an individual could build a workstation with commodity components with specifications comparable to commercially available low-end workstations. Workstations often featured 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. Additionally,

4482-410: The limited hardware of the time, and partly to a poorly implemented file system; saving a large file could take minutes. Crashes can be followed by an hours-long process called file scavenging , signaled by the appearance of the diagnostic code 7511 in the top left corner of the screen. The successor to the Star, the Xerox 6085 PCS, uses a different, more efficient hardware platform, Daybreak , using

4565-516: The micro-coded machines were phased out in favor of SPARC workstations and Intel PCs running a Mesa PrincOps emulator for the basic hardware instruction set. Mesa was compiled into a stack-machine language, purportedly with the highest code density ever achieved (roughly 4 bytes per high-level language statement). This was touted in a 1981 paper where implementors from the Xerox Systems Development Department (then,

4648-403: The mouse, and press dedicated special keys on the keyboard to invoke standard object functions (open, delete, copy, move) in a uniform way. There was also a "Show Properties" key used to display settings, called property sheets, for the particular object (such as font size for a character object). These general conventions greatly simplify the menu structure of all the programs. Object integration

4731-560: The name Star technically refers only to the software sold with the system for the office automation market. The 8010 workstations were also sold with software based on the programming languages Lisp and Smalltalk for the smaller research and software development market. The Xerox Star system's concept owes much to the Xerox Alto , an experimental workstation designed by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The first Alto became operational in 1972. The Alto had been strongly influenced by what its designers had seen previously with

4814-427: The new upstart division. Their marketing efforts were seen by some as half-hearted or unfocused. Furthermore, the most technically savvy sales representatives that might have sold office automation equipment were paid large commissions on leases of laser printer equipment costing up to a half-million dollars. No commission structure for decentralized systems could compete. The multi-lingual technical documentation market

4897-478: The operating system Pilot as well as ViewPoint GUI applications using a world swap mechanism. This allowed the entire "state" of the world to be swapped out, and allowed low-level system crashes which paralyzed the whole system to be debugged. This technique did not scale very well to large application images (several megabytes), and so the Pilot/Mesa world in later releases moved away from the world swap view when

4980-647: The potential of the Star can scarcely have been lost on its target (office systems) market, who would never have expected IBM to position a mass-market PC to threaten far more profitable dedicated WP systems. Unfortunately, the influential niche market of pioneering players in electronic publishing such as Longman were already aligning their production processes towards generic markup languages such as SGML (forerunner of HTML and XML) whereby authors using inexpensive offline systems could describe document structure, making their manuscripts ready for transfer to computer to film systems that offered far higher resolution than

5063-464: The richest exception facility for its time, with primitives SIGNAL , ERROR , ABORT , RETRY , CATCH , and CONTINUE . As the language did not have type-safe checks to verify full coverage for signal handling, uncaught exceptions were a common cause of bugs in released software. Mesa was the precursor to the programming language Cedar. Cedar's main additions were garbage collection , dynamic types , better string support through ropes ,

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5146-476: The same as the consumer market, and the price differential narrowed. For example, most Macintosh Quadra computers were originally intended for scientific or design work, all with the Motorola 68040 CPU, backward compatible with 68000 Macintoshes. The consumer Macintosh IIcx and Macintosh IIci models can be upgraded to the Quadra 700 . "In an era when many professionals preferred Silicon Graphics workstations,

5229-422: The same vendor. This allows software development to take place on low-cost (relative to the server) desktop machines. Workstations diversified to the lowest possible price point as opposed to performance, called the thin client or network computer . Dependent upon a network and server, this reduces the machine to having no hard drive, and only the CPU, keyboard, mouse, and screen. Some diskless nodes still run

5312-477: The software eventually overwhelmed its limited configuration. At one time in Star's development, it took more than half an hour to reboot the system. The next generation of these machines, the Dorado (aka D1), used an emitter-coupled logic (ECL) processor. It was four times faster than Dandelion on standard benchmarks, and thus competitive with the fastest super minicomputers of the day. It was used for research but

5395-568: The system was produced in conjunction with Fuji Xerox , code named J-Star, and full support for international customers. In the end, many features from the Star Functional Specification were not implemented. The product had to get to market, and the last several months before release focused on reliability and performance. The key philosophy of the user interface is to mimic the office paradigm as much as possible to make it intuitive for users. The concept of "what you see

5478-474: The then maximum of 360 dpi laser printing technologies. Another possible reason given for the lack of success of the Star was Xerox's corporate structure. A longtime copier company, Xerox played to their strengths. They already had one significant failure in making their acquisition of Scientific Data Systems pay off. It is said that there were internal jealousies between the old line copier systems divisions that were responsible for bulk of Xerox's revenues and

5561-426: The time, because Mesa is a "high level" programming language . Mesa is an ALGOL -like language with strong support for modular programming . Every library module has at least two source files: a definitions file specifying the library's interface plus one or more program files specifying the implementation of the procedures in the interface. To use a library, a program or higher-level library must "import"

5644-486: The time. The original 1981 IBM Personal Computer has 16 KB memory, a text-only display, and floating-point performance around 1  kFLOPS ( 30 kFLOPS with the optional 8087 math coprocessor. Other features beyond the typical personal computer include networking, graphics acceleration, and high-speed internal and peripheral data buses. Another goal was to bring the price below one " megapenny ", that is, less than $ 10,000 (equivalent to $ 28,000 in 2023), which

5727-549: The underlying operating system interface to the hardware and programming tools. Teams in El Segundo and Palo Alto collaborated on developing the user interface and user applications. The staff relied heavily on the technologies they were working on: file sharing, print servers, and email. They were even connected to the Internet , then named ARPANET , which helped them communicate between El Segundo and Palo Alto. The Star

5810-506: Was a rack-mounted CPU that was never intended to be an office product. A network router called Dicentra is based on this design. The released Star workstation hardware is called Dandelion (often shortened to "Dlion"). It is based on a design from in a PARC technical report, Wildflower: An Architecture for a Personal Computer , by Butler Lampson . It is based on the AMD Am2900 bitslice microprocessor technology . An enhanced version of

5893-448: Was achieved in the late 1980s. Throughout the early to mid-1990s, many workstations cost from $ 15,000 to $ 100,000 (equivalent to $ 200,000 in 2023) or more. The more widespread adoption of these technologies into mainstream PCs was a direct factor in the decline of the workstation as a separate market segment: Since the late 1990s, the workstation and consumer markets have further merged. Many low-end workstation components are now

5976-511: Was also a major opportunity, but this needed cross-border collaboration for which few sales organisations were ready at the time. Even within Xerox Corporation, in the mid-1980s, there was little understanding of the system. Few corporate executives ever saw or used the system, and the sales teams, if they requested a computer to assist with their planning, would instead receive older, CP/M -based Xerox 820 or 820-II systems. There

6059-591: Was an important vehicle for the development and dissemination of the fundamentals of GUIs , networked environments, and the other advances Xerox contributed to the field of computer science . Mesa was originally designed in the Computer Systems Laboratory (CSL), a branch of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, for the Alto , an experimental micro-coded workstation. Initially, its spread was confined to PARC and

6142-414: Was designed into the system from the start. For example, a chart object created in the graphing module can be inserted into any type of document. Eventually, Apple delivered this ability in the Lisa operating system , and on Macintosh as Publish and Subscribe . It became available on Microsoft Windows with the introduction of Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) in 1990. This approach was later used on

6225-405: Was done on Alto workstations. These were not well suited to the extreme burdens placed by the software. Even the processor intended for the product proved inadequate and involved a last minute hardware redesign. Many software redesigns, rewrites, and late additions had to be made, variously based on results from user testing, and marketing and systems considerations. A Japanese language version of

6308-419: Was implemented in the programming language Mesa , a direct precursor to Modula-2 and Modula-3 . Mesa is not object-oriented , but includes processes (threads) and monitors (mutexes) in the language. Mesa requires creating two files for every module: a definition module specified data structures and procedures for each object, and one or more implementation modules contained the code for the procedures. Traits

6391-459: Was introduced, buyers in the word processing industry were aware of the 8086-based IBM Displaywriter , the full-page portrait black-on-white Xerox 860 page display system and the 120 page-per-minute Xerox 9700 laser printer. Furthermore, the design principles of Smalltalk and modeless working had been extensively discussed in the August 1981 issue of Byte magazine, so Xerox PARC 's standing and

6474-515: Was no effort to seed the 8010/8012 Star systems within Xerox Corporation. Probably most significantly, strategic planners at the Xerox Systems Group (XSG) felt that they could not compete against other workstation makers such as Apollo Computer or Symbolics . The Xerox name alone was considered their greatest asset, but it did not produce customers. Finally, by later standards, the system would be considered very slow, due partly to

6557-479: Was not an easy sale, when a secretary's annual salary was about $ 12,000 and a VIC-20 cost around $ 300 . Later incarnations of the Star allow users to buy one unit with a laser printer , but only about 25,000 units were sold, leading many to consider it a commercial failure. The workstation was originally designed to run the Star software for performing office tasks, but it was also sold with different software for other markets. These other configurations included

6640-412: Was not originally meant to be a stand-alone computer, but to be part of an integrated Xerox "personal office system" that also connected to other workstations and network services via Ethernet. Although a single unit sold for $ 16,000 , a typical office would need to buy at least 2 or 3 machines along with a file server and a name server/print server. Spending $ 50,000 to 100,000 for a complete installation

6723-628: Was released for Windows and Linux. Workstation Workstations formerly offered higher performance than mainstream personal computers , especially in CPU , graphics , memory, and multitasking. Workstations are optimized for the visualization and manipulation of different types of complex data such as 3D mechanical design, engineering simulations like computational fluid dynamics , animation , video editing , image editing , medical imaging , image rendering, computational science , generating mathematical plots , and software development . Typically,

6806-528: Was taken up by meetings and planning, resulting in an extensive and detailed functional specification, internally termed the Red Book . This became the bible for all development tasks. It defined the interface and enforced consistency in all modules and tasks. All changes to the functional specification had to be approved by a review team which maintained standards rigorously. One group in Palo Alto worked on

6889-408: Was written in 1988 and allowed people to magnify sections of the workstation screen as defined by a resizable window and a changeable magnification factor. Trained Mesa programmers from Xerox were well versed in the fundamental of GUIs, networking, exceptions, and multi-threaded programming, almost a decade before they became standard tools of the trade. Within Xerox, Mesa was eventually superseded by

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