Page "Workstation" Paragraph 14

In the early 1980s, a high-end workstation had to meet the three Ms.

The so-called " 3M computer " had a Megabyte of memory, a Megapixel display ( roughly 1000x1000 ), and a " MegaFLOPS " compute performance ( at least one million floating point operations per second ).

As limited as this seems today, it was at least an order of magnitude beyond the capacity of the personal computer of the time ; the original 1981 IBM PC had 16 KB memory, a text-only display, and floating-point performance around 1 kiloFLOPS ( 30 kiloFLOPS with the optional 8087 math coprocessor ).

Other desirable features not found in desktop computers at that time included networking, graphics acceleration, and high-speed internal and peripheral data buses.