On 20 Oct 98 at 16:42, Roberto Safora wrote:

> Untill now I thought PC and workstation were the same; however
> magazines talk of pc, workstations, servers and so on. Would
> somebody give a more or less professional classifications or
> concept of each one? Is the difference among them, physical or
> depends on how I use them?

PC
  Basically, any machine that is capable of running DOS.  This means
that it will use a CPU that implements the "x86" instruction set
(including chips from Intel, AMD, Cyrix/National, IBM, IDT, NEC and
Rise) and includes a ROM BIOS that implements a standard set of
functions.

Workstation
  A workstation is a high-end single-user system.  It might or might
not meet the detailed specs of a PC -- it could be a Sun or SGI box
running some flavour of Unix.  It's almost certainly networked
(there's nothing about networking in the "PC" spec), and probably
runs some kind of GUI, often on a largish monitor.

Server
  A server hosts some resource(s) and/or function(s) which are made
available over a network to other machines as needed.  One speaks
of a "file server", with lots of disk space, or a "compute server"
with fast/multiple CPUs, or a "mail server" that passes outbound
email to an outside machine and collects inbound mail and makes it
available to users.  You generally don't want someone sitting at a
server running GUI applications.

David G

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