HP Z2 Tower G4 Workstation (8JF81UT#ABA)

A tower is a tall structure, taller than it is wide, often by a significant factor. Towers are distinguished from masts by their lack of guy-wires and are therefore, along with tall buildings, self-supporting structures.

Towers are specifically distinguished from buildings in that they are built not to be habitable but to serve other functions using the height of the tower. For example, the height of a clock tower improves the visibility of the clock, and the height of a tower in a fortified building such as a castle increases the visibility of the surroundings for defensive purposes. Towers may also be built for observation, leisure, or telecommunication purposes. A tower can stand alone or be supported by adjacent buildings, or it may be a feature on top of a larger structure or building.

A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term workstation has been used loosely to refer to everything from a mainframe computer terminal to a PC connected to a network, but the most common form refers to the class of hardware offered by several current and defunct companies such as Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Apollo Computer, DEC, HP, NeXT, and IBM which powered the 3D computer graphics revolution of the late 1990s.

Workstations formerly offered higher performance than mainstream personal computers, especially in CPU, graphics, memory, and multitasking. Workstations are optimized for the visualization and manipulation of different types of complex data such as 3D mechanical design, engineering simulations like computational fluid dynamics, animation, video editing, image editing, medical imaging, image rendering, computational science, and mathematical plots. Typically, the form factor is that of a desktop computer, which consists of a high-resolution display, a keyboard, and a mouse at a minimum, but also offers multiple displays, graphics tablets, and 3D mice for manipulating objects and navigating scenes. Workstations were the first segment of the computer market to present advanced accessories, and collaboration tools like videoconferencing.

The increasing capabilities of mainstream PCs since the late 1990s have reduced distinction between the PCs and workstations. Typical 1980s workstations have expensive proprietary hardware and operating systems to categorically distinguish from standardized PCs. From the 1990s and 2000s, IBM's RS/6000 and IntelliStation have RISC-based POWER CPUs running AIX, and its IBM PC Series and Aptiva corporate and consumer PCs have Intel x86 CPUs. However, by the early 2000s, this difference largely disappeared, since workstations use highly commoditized hardware dominated by large PC vendors, such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Fujitsu, selling x86-64 systems running Windows or Linux.

Z2 may refer to:

• Z2 (computer), a computer created by Konrad Zuse
• Z2 (company), video game developer
• Z2 Comics, a publisher of graphic novels
• ${\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} _{2}}$, the quotient ring of the ring of integers modulo the ideal of even numbers, alternatively denoted by ${\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} /2\mathbb {Z} }$
• Z₂, the cyclic group of order 2
• GF(2), the Galois field of 2 elements, alternatively written as Z₂
• Z₂, the standard axiomatization of second-order arithmetic
• Z² (album), an album by Devin Townsend
• German destroyer Z2 Georg Thiele, a Type 1934 destroyer in the German Kriegsmarine
• USS Ringgold (DD-500), a destroyer transferred to the German Navy as Z-2 in 1959
• Westinghouse Airships Z-2 blimp prototype for the U.S. Navy
• Kawasaki Z2, a motorcycle
• RAID-Z2, a way to combine multiple disk drives in a computer
• Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, the second video game in the Legend of Zelda series
• Zork II, a computer game
• A wireless speaker system from Bowers & Wilkins
• Philippines AirAsia, an airline based in Pasay, Philippines
• The Sony Xperia Z2, an Android smartphone
• Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City, a 2010 film
• Zoolander 2, a 2016 film