I believe the term "workstation" came from the integrated interactive
engineering design terminals/systems.  Can't remember details, but
companies like ComputerVision had had them before UNIX and 68000 were a
thing,

On Wed, 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>
>