Guest Editors' Introduction Computer Workstations

ware design and development, technical publishing, and advanced office applications. Integrated circuits, mechanical assemblies, computer programs, complex technical documents, and business reports and presentations are today being more efficiently and effectively designed and developed by professionals using dedicated computer workstations. Graphics is so integral to these workstations and applications that the term graphics workstation is redundant. Last November in San Jose, California, IEEE held the First International Conference on Computer Workstations. This conference recognized that workstations are rapidly becoming a sizable segment of the computer business, and that systems of workstations (ideally linked to mainframes) are becoming a major computer resource of many organizations. The idea of a computer workstation-a combination of computational power and display capability, used to perform a professional task-is not a recent notion. Over the past decade a number of tasks have been done on a small computer and attached display dedicated to a single user. In computer-aided design in the automotive industry, for example, designers have used a large computer with attached powerful display terminals on a timeshare basis. The resulting performance has often demonstrated the effects of this economic compromise: When systems become heavily loaded, users adjust their schedules to avoid the interference caused by sharing with colleagues. Rapid advances in the semiconductor industry are the primary cause for the increased emphasis on computer workstations. With microprocessors having the power of recent mainframe CPUs, the compromises of time-sharing are no longer necessary. In most interactive applications the power of the micro that can affordably be dedicated to a single user in a workstation will more than satisfy the requirements of the user's tasks. This economical and powerful computational capability is creating an ever-increasing number of workstation customers, as it continues to be less of an economic burden to provide a dedicated and powerful machine to each user. 64-