How were rackmount workstations wired-up to mice, keyboards, monitors, etc?

Question

"Workstation"-class machines have long been available in today's conventional desktop form-factor, but have also been available in a rack-mountable form-factor, for installation into a server-rack in another room in the building - or in a "deskside" cabinet.

Going right back to the early 1980s, when CAD systems would run on systems like the Data General Eclipse, which would necessarily have to be in another room, this meant there would have to be some connection from the user's desktop to the computer next-door - but also through the 1990s and early-2000s with the SGI Onyx and Tezro respectively.

(Tangentially, I'm wondering why they're even called "Workstations" if they live in a rack: usually it's only headless servers that can really be accommodated in a rack; while SGI did have other rack-mountable machines specifically called "Servers" and not Workstations, so is there anything to the naming convention? In my head the term "Workstation" implies it's being used for real-time interactive use by a single user, whereas some of the documentation for the rack-mount Onyx implies it might be used in a TV production situation, generating graphics in real-time directly for broadcast driven by automated software instead of someone interactively using CAD/CFD/3D software).

So assuming this rather beefy hardware is running in a rack on the other-side of a wall, how are the end-user's mice, monitor, and keyboard, and any other peripherals (e.g. CAD digitizer), supposed to be attached?

...in the case of D-Sub VGA, I understand the maximum cable length is on the order of 150 feet, but given these computers' displays would be running very high resolutions, sometimes even by today's standards, certainly not capable of being transported by an early-1990s VGA cable, so how would they have been connected over, say, a 75-foot distance? In SGI's case they had their DB13W3 connector and cables but I can't find any information about its maximum-length, and Wikipedia says that D-Sub VGA and DVI effectively replaced it anyway, but DVI has a very short maximum cable length (~5m, I understand) - so if DB13W3 did support cables long enough to stretch between rooms it seems odd that it would be replaced with an interconnect that couldn't.

Mice and keyboards also pose a challenge: even if USB existed back then the USB 1.x specification sets a maximum length of 3m - you can workaround this using powered repeaters/hubs but that still wouldn't get you beyond ~15m, and bulky hubs wouldn't work with tight conduits between rooms - not to mention hub propagation latency making mice awkward to use. As for PS/2, I couldn't find any authoritative info on maximum cable-length.

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So imagine it's 1992 and you work at Pixar and you've got a flashy new rack-mount SGI in the HVAC'd room next-door - how does your mouse and keyboard, and (multiple?) monitors connect to the box?

And if you've got a CD full of art assets you want to load-up, do you have a desk-top SCSI drive with a cable snaking its way next-door - or would you need to physically walk to the rack-mount box and pop the CD in that way? If there's dozens - or more - of people with similar workstations how do the IT people manage having to route all those (presumably very thick) cables?

Answer 1

Another route was X terminals: low-powered computers with big screens that communicated with a CAD server over Ethernet. Keyboards, mice, digitizers and other peripherals were connected to the X terminal, by whatever cabling was used at the time - often RS-232. The X protocol carried information from peripherals to the CAD server over Ethernet; it's quite general-purpose.

Answer 2

In 1992 my workstation wasn't rackmounted, it was a pizza box under my CRT monitor or a PC-style tower or half-tower tucked under my desk. Servers in the machine room were the same form factors (pizza boxes, towers, lunchboxes) but headless. The machine room also had a rolling cart with a 17-inch CRT, a keyboard, and a mouse, but it was fairly rare to plug them into anything. A couple years later KVM (keyboard/video/mouse) switches started to appear, but my workplaces tended to not have them. There were often Wyse 50 or 70 terminals in machine rooms because they were cheaper than DECs and could connect to the serial consoles of the headless servers.

Answer 3

on systems like the Data General Eclipse, which would necessarily have to be in another room

Not necessarily. In the link, they talk about "Series 1000" and "Series 2000", so given the year, I assume they mean an Eclipse MV/1000 and MV/2000, which are part of the MV/8000 line.

We have pictures of how that looked like, e.g. in the picture from here, which shows an MV/8000 installation (from Data General sales literature, note the absence of cabling, but you get a sense for the scale of the equipment):

You can see the cabinets against the wall and the "workstations" (screen with keyboard) in the middle of the room, with people sitting in front.

why they're even called "Workstations" if they live in a rack

Well, the minicomputer lives in a cabinet, the "stations" where people sit down and "work" don't. It even says in your link that e.g. the MV/1000 "supports two workstations".

end-user's mice, monitor, and keyboard, and any other peripherals (e.g. CAD digitizer), supposed to be attached?

Just like on your PC: Through a cable that goes to specific peripheral hardware inside the cabinet.

For example, there is the Data General Dasher line of display terminals for the earlier Nova, connected via a serial link with up to 19,200 bps. The D460 had graphics capabilities via up to 3572 user-defined characters or symbols; this was e.g. used in the Data General Trendview and Present software packages to display pie charts etc.

I have not found a catalog of the MV/8000 periphery, but they probably had similar graphics capabilities inside the terminal, which is enough for CAD.

in the case of D-Sub VGA

The graphics are generated in the electronics integrated into (or close to) the monitor, not in the cabinet.

Mice and keyboards also pose a challenge: even if USB existed back then the USB 1.x specification sets a maximum length of 3m

Serial can easily go looong distances. Just look at how IBM terminals are connected to the mainframes. And no, it wasn't USB. :-)

Answer 4

I have seen a setup where the machine room and the terminal room were neighbors and connected through a series of holes in the wall. Machines were in racks in the machine room and keyboards, screens and mice were in the terminal room. Max cable length was probably less than three meters.

The point of this setup was to avoid noise, and also cool the machine room down below human-comfortable temperature.

I doubt this was a common setup.

Answer 5

There are two answers.

Answer 1. This was rare: although machines with framebuffers sometimes came in rack-mount form they were generally then being used headless. Far more common was something like a Sun 3/160 which was a fairly substantial VME-based machine which sat in a deskside box. There was an entirely (from memory) equivalent machine, the 3/180, which sat in a rack. We had both: the 3/180 was in the machine room with a terminal as its console and the framebuffer unused, and the 3/160s in the office with screens. And yes: they were not that quiet, but quieter than the 3/180 with a couple of Eagles underneath it. People put up with a lot of noise.

Answer 2. When it was done the answer was long, often custom-made cables combined with often marginal display quality. As an example we had a Symbolics 3670 which was a full-height 19-inch rack (not, I think, completely full, but the machine itself was perhaps half of the rack), and the disk (another Eagle) was another good chunk of it). Nobody wanted that in the office, even then. So it sat in the machine room with a very long cable running up 4 floors (I think) to its screen, keyboard & mouse. I think the mouse & keyboard plugged into the back of the screen: obviously the entire interface was proprietary. The screen was marginal but usable, obviously helped by being B/W.

Answer 6

So imagine it's 1992 and you work at Pixar and you've got a flashy new rack-mount SGI in the HVAC'd room next-door - how does your mouse and keyboard, and (multiple?) monitors connect to the box?

I never worked at Pixar but can tell my experience with SGIs. My college had SGIs (Indys?) as workstations in a lab at the third floor which were connected through ethernet (10Base; the department did not have 100Base-T network when I was there) to the larger SGI server (could have been an octane) and the maspar (this one was also in the third floor but in its own room; I can't remember where the SGI was server). You logged into the workstations, which would NFS mount your homedir, and then if you wanted to run something in the servers you started a Xsession in it (think VNC) or xforwarded the application into your workstation.

That was what made X11 better than any GUI at the time (Mac, Windows, Amiga). Playing a multiuser combat simulation was very easy compared to the PCs, and SGI did come with one.

FYI, those machines were bought with grant money, so years after grant was over they were used for some undergraduate classes. Ok, not the maspar; that was for grad research. The Indys were not as loud as the desktop PCs the faculty had.

So, what about the rodents and keyboards? Every machine had their own. The server monitors were usually small crappy ones because they were only turned on if the sysadmin needed to do something to them in person. The Maspar keyboard usually sat on the top of the rack.

Answer 7

One company I worked at used video/keyboard extenders that allowed the machine to be upto about 50 metres from the monitor. It did cut down on fan noice in the office but required permission from the IT manager to reboot your machine and 2nd monitors where not possible.

If I knew the setup before took the job I would have not taken the job as companies with such control attudues where not fun to work for.

Answer 8

There used to be several options, depending on if you really wanted to access the framebuffer of the workstation for its graphics:

• Console-only, wired to a serial terminal via a (sufficiently long) serial cable.
• Console-only, serial console port wired to a terminal concentrator (mapping its serial ports to telnet port adresses).
• Framebuffer ("Graphic Card") wired via an extension "cable" (some of those translating to fibre optics as a means to extend the limitations of the default cabling). Not cheap. Keyboard and mice used to be serial, so these were usually less of a limitation. (Of the variants listed here, this or a full-fledged KVM extender was the only one providing access to the graphic console of the system)
• For more cumbersome systems that did not offer a serial console port, KVM extenders had to be used, and still are in use today.
• XDMCP login to the system from any other desktop system running X11.

When Workstations were mounted in racks, that was often done to ensure better ventilation for the system and less noise for the user. People would rarely connect directly to a framebuffer, even if present. For those that needed the framebuffer, long cables were available (at a price). The keyboards were usually serial, so using a longer cable wasn't a problem. More often the (serial) console would be used though, either with a terminal attached directly, or via a terminal concentrator that bundled 8 or 16 terminal lines, supplying them via telnet ports to everyone with access to the subnet in question.

Those desiring fancy graphics most often used X Terminals or older systems running a stripped down OS presenting an XDMCP login.