The Workstation - History of the Desktop
With an accelerating trend to a decentralized computing environment and toward the desktop computer in the 1980s, workstations emerged as the most powerful versions of desktop computers with price tags that were at least in the five-figure range and could easily approach six figures for fully decked out computer systems. These high-end systems were very much the Formula 1 of desktop computers, which, however, adopted many of the once exclusive components of workstations such as powerful processors, capable graphics cards, and networking equipment and blurred the lines to workstations. Since the 1990s, workstations have undergone several phases of declines and renaissances. Today, workstations are largely defined by their integration of high-end graphics cards, floating point accelerators, server-grade microprocessors as well as large amounts of memory.