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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.
@ChuckMcManis Maybe Alan Kay came close to envisioning handheld devices doing most of what PCs did. As for Gordon, his vision was remarkably deep.
@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.
@symbolics That sure qualifies.
@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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