A 1988 keynote by Gordon Bell on the history of personal workstations.

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

A 1988 keynote by Gordon Bell on the history of personal workstations. The concept of personal workstation he covers is broader than machines like Suns and has deeper roots.

What's remarkable is Bell was fully aware that PCs were soon going to make workstations extinct.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/61975.66913

#workstation #retrocomputing

[n1kdo@mastodon.radio]

@amoroso That's an interesting paper. My Dad worked for DEC, his home computer in 1980 was a PDT-11/150. Later I worked on DEC VAX workstations as a software engineer.
There was a conference room named after Gordon Bell in DEC's software engineering facility in Nashua NH.

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@n1kdo Great memories.

[fluidlogic@oldbytes.space]

@amoroso nice one. Thank you for bringing attention to this important conference. Every speaker is a luminary in the history of computing. The conference took place in 1986 and the collected papers were published in 1988.

The talks were videotaped: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQsxaNhYv8dbIuONzZcrM0IM7sTPQFqgr

The collected papers, edited by Adele Goldberg: https://archive.org/details/historyofpersona00gold/page/n10/mode/1up

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@fluidlogic Thanks for the context, definitely a star studded cast.

[symbolics@mastodon.social]

@amoroso The first real personal workstation I saw and touched was quite exotic: a #Symbolics 3600 #Lisp Machine: megapixel screen, ethernet, disk, tape drive, mouse, a few megabytes of tagged 36bit memory with a Lisp CPU with roughly one MIPS speed and a Motorola 68k as a frontend processor. Introduced in 1983.

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@symbolics That sure qualifies.