Introduction to Apollo Workstations

Abstract

This chapter is intended to introduce the reader to workstations, and to explain how they differ from other types of computers. The term ‘workstation’ is, in fact, used to describe anything from simple visual display units to extremely powerful stand-alone, single-user machines used for a variety of applications. Workstations fall into two broad categories: the ‘professional workstation’, and the ‘technical workstation’. The first category, the professional workstation, is an office automation product incorporating a personal microcomputer with telephone and communications facilities, to provide voice and data services of an administrative nature. The technical workstation is a much more powerful concept. It has (a) a high-resolution, bit-mapped graphics display, with a resolution of at least 1024 × 800 pixels, (b) significant computational power (from one to four million instructions per second), (c) a virtual memory operating system providing an address space of at least 64 million bytes, (d) a networking capability, and (e) an ability to concurrently share files. The technical workstation is the subject of this chapter.