Many colleges and universities make workstations available for engineering students or for general use with a variety of personal computers in computing labs. Steve Jobs, who co-founded Apple and created the Macintosh, introduced the first personal workstation for students, the NeXT Computer System. Although it is more expensive than a personal computer, it offers many more features. The NeXT has highly detailed graphics, sound, and even music. It has many built-in applications and special tools such as a library containing a dictionary, a thesaurus, a book of famous quotations, and the works of William Shakespeare. The newest NeXT computer uses a RISC microprocessor, which makes it three times faster than it was when it used a CISC microprocessor.
From the beginning, Allen Michels envisioned a workstation that would integrate many tasks and functions in an easy-to-use computer. This would come about through the marriage of a variety of hardware and software technologies, combined with new insights into ergonomics,the study of how to create safety, comfort, and ease of use for people who use machines such as computers. As computer engineers learn more about how we think and work, workstations will just keep getting more useful.
