[TUHS] Re: Earliest UNIX Workstations?

[arnold@skeeve.com]

We had some at Georgia Tech when I was in grad school. The Accent OS for it
from CMU (I think) had a lot of ideas and techniques that showed up
later in Mach.  I once referred to Mach as "Accent running on a vax".

IIRC they had portrait shaped fairly large monochrome bitmapped displays.
But I may be misremembering.

At the time I felt like anything that wasn't Unix / written in C
wasn't worth messing with.

Arnold

Marc Donner <marc.donner@gmail.com> wrote:

> PERQ
>
> There was some talk of making Unix run on it, but POS (PERQ-OS) was written
> in Pascal and there was no reasonable way to port over all of the existing
> stuff without rewriting it all.  I had a PERQ in my office for a while … it
> put out so much heat and noise that my officemates lobbied to have me
> evicted.
>
> On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 8:01 PM Larry Stewart <stewart@serissa.com> wrote:
>
> > There was quite a lot of early activity of course!
> > Essentially all of computer science academia was aware of the Xerox Alto,
> > although it wasn't a commercial product and wasn't Unix.
> >
> > Jim Morris left PARC and went off to CMU and began talking up the idea of
> > the "3M" workstation.  One MIPs, One Megabyte of RAM, and One Million
> > Pixels.
> >
> > One of the early commercial attempts was the Three Rivers PERC (or PERQ?)
> > from the Pittsburgh startup.  There were Unix adjacent systems as well,
> > such as Apollo Domain.
> >
> > Of course then Sun got started, and MIPS, and the IBM RT and VaxStations
> > so by the mid '80s it was quite crowded.
> >
> > There is a whole other arc about the graphics workstations, with SGI,
> > Ardent, Stellar, Stardent, and so on.
> >
> > Also, before graphics became affordable, there were various clustered
> > character generator based systems like Convergent Technologies.
> >
> > -L
> >
> > On Jan 25, 2023, at 7:31 PM, Joseph Holsten <joseph@josephholsten.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > It seems like there are bountiful articles able the decline and fall of
> > the UNIX workstation, but I’ve had a hard time finding narrative about
> > workstations prior to the Stanford SUN workstation.
> >
> >
> > * was the SUN-1 the first commercially successful product? What are the
> > “it depends” edge cases?
> > * were there common recipes for proto-workstations within academic or
> > industrial research? What did those look like, who was involved?
> > * What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had a
> > PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is it
> > the integration of display into the system that differentiates?
> >
> > --
> > Joseph Holsten
> > http://josephholsten.com
> > mailto:joseph@josephholsten.com
> > tel:+1-360-927-7234 <(360)%20927-7234>
> >
> > --
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