A 1988 keynote by Gordon Bell on the history of personal workstations.
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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.
@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
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@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
@fluidlogic Thanks for the context, definitely a star studded cast.
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undefined Paolo Amoroso shared this topic
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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.
@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.
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@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.
@symbolics That sure qualifies.
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@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.
My first too! (Might have been an LM-2 a few months earlier, I forget.)
Everything else since then has been a disappointment.
Faster, sure. But also persistently stupider.
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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.
@amoroso It is a great keynote, and to his credit Gordon saw minicomputers making mainframes "extinct" (which isn't precisely true but certainly knocked them off the top of the food pyramid) and saw how Sun was eating DEC's lunch with workstations, and that would lead to PCs eating the workstations. I don't think anyone had phones eating the PC on their bingo card but may be mistaken on that.
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My first too! (Might have been an LM-2 a few months earlier, I forget.)
Everything else since then has been a disappointment.
Faster, sure. But also persistently stupider.
@weekend_editor While you guys were playing with those toys my very first personal workstation was this.
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@amoroso It is a great keynote, and to his credit Gordon saw minicomputers making mainframes "extinct" (which isn't precisely true but certainly knocked them off the top of the food pyramid) and saw how Sun was eating DEC's lunch with workstations, and that would lead to PCs eating the workstations. I don't think anyone had phones eating the PC on their bingo card but may be mistaken on that.
@ChuckMcManis Maybe Alan Kay came close to envisioning handheld devices doing most of what PCs did. As for Gordon, his vision was remarkably deep.
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@weekend_editor While you guys were playing with those toys my very first personal workstation was this.
Well... you had a color display before we did?
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Well... you had a color display before we did?
@weekend_editor That's why yours were toys.
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Well... you had a color display before we did?
@weekend_editor @amoroso Probably, but vision was also a topic in the AI lab. I've seen a researcher doing 3d video analysis using a 3640. Night long runs to compute 3d filters over videos. That machine also had a color board, IIRC.
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@weekend_editor @amoroso Probably, but vision was also a topic in the AI lab. I've seen a researcher doing 3d video analysis using a 3640. Night long runs to compute 3d filters over videos. That machine also had a color board, IIRC.
There was (eventually) a color board, which would either do full 32-bit color or pack things into 8-bit color with the colors looked up in a color map.
It was *very* expensive, even the monitor was north of $10k as I recall.
It was geared at Hollywood types, with gen locking and all that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_and_Stella_in:_Breaking_the_Ice
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There was (eventually) a color board, which would either do full 32-bit color or pack things into 8-bit color with the colors looked up in a color map.
It was *very* expensive, even the monitor was north of $10k as I recall.
It was geared at Hollywood types, with gen locking and all that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_and_Stella_in:_Breaking_the_Ice
@weekend_editor What timeframe was that? Interlisp-D supported color on secondary displays no later than 1990, but probably not much earlier than a couple of years.
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@weekend_editor What timeframe was that? Interlisp-D supported color on secondary displays no later than 1990, but probably not much earlier than a couple of years.
Late 1984.
Definitely by 1985. That was the year Scientific American had the Mandelbrot set on the cover. I had a color display & color board for some reason, probably because I write a demo for sales. Since I was a physics grad student on hiatus, everybody wanted me to show them how to map the complex plane onto the color display and "do mandelbrots".
That was fun!
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Late 1984.
Definitely by 1985. That was the year Scientific American had the Mandelbrot set on the cover. I had a color display & color board for some reason, probably because I write a demo for sales. Since I was a physics grad student on hiatus, everybody wanted me to show them how to map the complex plane onto the color display and "do mandelbrots".
That was fun!
@weekend_editor I found a couple of Interlisp-D source files for color support timestamped 1986.
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