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 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 > 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> > > -- ===== nygeek.net mindthegapdialogs.com/home