High end workstations in 1992

 

Sometimes it helps to understand the current situation with a look into the past. The importance of the year 1992 for the computer history was explained already. It marks the the revolution from the old decade of classical computing into the new internet based global network of interconnected computers. In the 1980s and 1990s as well workstation computers were the most expensive personal computers available. They were sold for 40k US$ and more and they were created in a low amount of quantities. Workstation computers were used by engineers, technical writers and of course by computer programmers to design the new generation of future technology not invented yet. All the layout software in publishing houses, all the video game development for home computers, all the movie production were realized with workstation computers.

The interesting point is that from today's perspective the hardware capabilities of workstations in the 1990s were low. A typical system in the year 1992 was equipped with a 32bit CPU and not more than 16 MB of RAM For this time, such a configuration was state of the art. It was the most advanced technology available at this time.

Similar to the computer technology in general the development never stood still but it has improved all the time. Workstations in the year 1993 were much better and in 1994 the hardware was improved further. Around the year 2000 the workstations and concumer PC technology have become the same and the price has reduced drastically. But let us stay for a second in the year 1992. What sort of tasks can be realized with a 16 MB RAM workstation? Right not very much. So the question is, what exactly was the difference between a high end workstation and a home computer like the Commodore 64?

If we are taking a look into the publication around the C64 in the 1980s and 1990s it is a bit surprising how often the 8bit computer was compared with PCs and even with workstation. The interesting point is, that this comparison makes sense. The difference between a 3d animation on the C64 and a 3d Animation on a 16mb RAM workstation is not very large. The problem was, that even on a 40k US$ workstation from 1992 it wasn't possible to render something in realtime with 30fps because for such tasks the hardware was too slow. And creating a simple newspaper with some pictures was also beyond the capabilities of high end workstations at this time.

There are some videos available at youtube which are showing some so called workstations from the 1990s in action. What the user see is, that the GUI is rendering the window very slow and the graphics are not shown with colors, but there is only a frame in blackwhite. What Commodore 64 users have done in the late 1980s was to accept the limitations of their hardware and created software which was working fine with low amount of RAM. So we can say, that in the late 1980s a commodore 64 had a much better price to performance ratio than any other machine out there. Sure, the amount 64kb RAM is not very large, but the computer industry in general struggled in the past to provide larger amount of memory.