The Future of the Workstation From the Monterey Bay Area Users Group Recently, I was asked by several students at a local college what I saw as the future of "workstations". The question was being asked in the context of a practice marketing study for a workstation vendor. I took some time to reflect upon their questions remembering that I had been asked almost the identical questions years back. Only then the subject of the study was mini-computers. When first asked, I had just begun working with microprocessors, Motorola 6800's under the guidance of one of New England's more brilliant systems wizards, Bill Taylor. He was most fond of saying, "One user, one processor!" -- which he later changed to, "One user, at least one processor". I was a mainframe and minicomputer programmer, and had difficulty seeing how the cost of a processor could ever be justifiably borne by one user. These microprocessors, they were wimpy little toys, hardly suitable for anything involving heavy computation! Sure, they could be used as controllers, or in cash registers, but they would never take the place of real computers. How could you do a payroll, calculate the path of a satellite, or engage in large scale data analyses with one of these? The PC now on my desk has 20 times the physical memory of the mainframe I was writing code for several years ago. It is faster, vastly more interactive and oh so much smaller. I could heat a very large building with the power required for that old beast; that baby was water-cooled! The future of workstations. Workstations are essentially minicomputers made small. By and large, these systems run some variant of UNIX, a 1960's style operating system made popular by Bell Labs freely giving it to universities "for research purposes". UNIX is a multi-user, multi-tasking operating system perpetuating the philosophy of the minicomputer, "a processor must be shared among users to justify its cost". UNIX predates MS-DOS in the marketplace, yet it represents a very small fraction of the desktop market. Windows has a larger market share now and Windows-NT is projected (by Microsoft) to outstrip it even further. It is ballyhooed by its proponents as the replacement for DOS, yet this has not happened. Its market share is not even growing at the same rate as oft-pronounced dead MS-DOS. Why not? Simple economics... Why Does It Cost So Much? UNIX programs cost more because there are fewer UNIX machines (smaller market). One could argue that there are fewer UNIX machines because they cost more. Furthermore, workstations do not have binary compatibility (a complicated way of saying that an application for one will probably not work on another). The incompatibility problems shared by DOS users pale in comparison to those of workstation software developers. This further divides the market, pushing up costs. As a consequence, it is not uncommon for vendors to charge 4-6 times the price of a DOS application for a UNIX version. It's often justified saying that the workstation costs more and so it is fitting that the software should as well. This is hogwash. Daily, I read of applications which can only be brought to fruition on workstation machines. Unfortunately, this is advertising puffery. PCs have come into their own right. With powerful multi-tasking operating systems like OS/2 and Windows-NT, the death knell for workstations is beginning to toll, as it did for mainframes and minicomputers in past years. Users want the benefits that workstations provide, but aside from multi-tasking and networking which are already available to high-end PCs, what are these benefits? Bigger screens? 486 and 586 (er, Pentium) machines share the same disk drives, the same network communications, and the same or better (but certainly cheaper) add-on devices. PCs consistently demonstrate better, more usable, friendlier and just plain more software than workstations. PC software gets better faster and in greater abundance than that available for UNIX platforms. The PC market itself is larger, more aggressive and more compatible than the workstation market is likely to ever become. The Toymaker is Winning PC users are moving up, getting bigger, faster and more powerful machines. Application vendors who previously ignored these "toys" are seeing competition brewing from below and are racing pell mell to "port down" to OS/2 or (more likely) Windows-NT. Now if you had a program which you could offer to a market 100 times as large, wouldn't you "port down"? Workstation vendors are betting their future that they can reduce costs and achieve widespread portability faster than PC vendors can push up performance. The odds on this bet are very, very long. So, sitting here smugly in front of a 486 clone, multitasking like a mad fiend, I must conclude that the future for workstation vendors is looking pretty grim. As I reflect back upon what Bill said long ago, I am comforted knowing that my computer has at least four processors, each performing separate functions, but all working just for me. Besides, being an only child, I really never learned (nor enjoyed) sharing.