The idea of early computer users having an entire processor to themselves was just a fantasy. The first computer networks had all the processing power in a central mainframe, or server, to which individual workstations would connect. Each workstation would then get a limited amount of time to send work to the central processor. Personal computers have made such arrangements unnecessary, but the terms persist. A workstation is a personal computer, and servers are the central machines that provide data to workstations.
A server is a computer whose purpose is to handle requests for data from other computers. Website servers provide visitors' computers with the data necessary to display its Web pages; servers on your company's local network provide files to your employees' computers. Servers can host applications, but people access that application through their own computers. Employees do not sit down at a server to do their work, unless their work is maintaining the server.
When you sit down at your laptop or desktop computer to type up a report or create a presentation, the machine's only purpose is to generate your text or presentation file. In the classic server-workstation model, the computer you personally use for your work is a work station. However, in contemporary usage some people reserve the term workstation to refer to a high end computers that perform computationally intensive tasks. These tasks can include things like graphic design and rendering or advanced data modelling.
A server has the same basic hardware as a workstation: hard drives, RAM, processors, and network adapters. You can even take a desktop tower and change its software to transform it from a workstation into a server. Companies sell hardware that is meant and optimized to be servers, such as server blades designed for stacking in server racks. These frequently do not have a video card to plug into a screen because server administrators generally log into the servers through their laptops or desktops to perform maintenance. It is not difficult to convert a workstation into a server, but the hardware in specialized servers are very difficult to try to use as a workstation.
You can use servers to share files around the office or for hosting your website's code, but they also serve many more specialized purposes. Proxy servers can help secure your website by requesting page data on behalf of your visitors, making it much harder for them to penetrate your company's network. Cache servers speed up your website's performance by storing frequently requested data for fast retrieval, and cloud servers can host advanced Web apps that take processor-intensive tasks from workstations and spread the work across the processors in multiple servers. The servers then send the final products back to a workstation.
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