What differentiates a Workstation from a PC (Re: What should GNU run on (was Re: what kinds of things . . .))

[Guy Harris]

>In "workstations", either the graphics board can do many of these
>things itself (i.e. the Sun color framebuffers or the Silicon Graphics
>machines), or the workstation is only used for the display and keyboard
>functions (i.e. X server only workstations or the AT&T 630) and
>another machine is used for compute bound processing.

The machine on my desk, a Sun-3/50, is not being used only for the
display and keyboard functions - I do compiles on it all the time - and
its frame buffer is a boring old array of bits.  The 3/50 is generally
considered a workstation, not a PC....

I don't even know that on all *color* workstations there's special
hardware to move the 8-or-more-times-bigger pixels around.

I think there exist graphics accelerators for PCs as well, so the
presence or absence of a graphics accelerator is *not* what makes the
difference between a PC and a workstation.