A secondhand workstation, such as a Unix secondhand workstation, RISC secondhand workstation or engineering secondhand workstation, is a high-end microcomputer designed for technical or scientific applications. Secondhand workstations are intended primarily to be used by one person at a time, although they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems.

 

Historically, secondhand workstations offered higher performance than normally seen on contemporary personal computers, especially with respect to graphics and CPU power, memory capacity and multitasking ability.

 

Secondhand workstations are often optimized for displaying and manipulating complex data such as 3D mechanical design, engineering simulation results such as for computational fluid dynamics, animation and rendering of images, and mathematical plots. Consoles usually consist of a high resolution display, a keyboard and a mouse at a minimum, but often support multiple displays and may often use the fastest available versions of microprocessors. For design and advanced visualization tasks, specialized input hardware such as graphics tablets or a SpaceBall can be used. Secondhand workstations have classically been the first part of the computer market to offer advanced accessories and collaboration tools such as videoconferencing capability.

 

Following the performance trends of computers in general, today's average personal computer is more powerful than the top-of-the-line secondhand workstations of one or two generations before. As a result, the secondhand workstation market is becoming increasingly specialized, since many complex operations that formerly required high-end systems can now be handled by general-purpose PCs. However, secondhand workstations are designed and optimized for situations requiring considerable computing power, where they tend to remain usable while traditional personal computers quickly become unresponsive. Secondhand workstations perform work of such value to their owners that they are free of the requirement to run mass-market commodity operating systems. While the technology between secondhand workstations and PCs has since become similar, secondhand workstations still have many specialized features not found on their PC counterparts.

 

The term "secondhand workstation" has also been used to refer to a terminal or PC connected up to network.