Toward a history of (personal) workstations

ABSTRACT

I originally accepted this keynote honor for five reasons: to respond to Alan Perlis' request (he told me I could present anything from a new taxonomy to personal reminiscences); second, to identify the important artifacts that should be preserved in The Computer Museum; third, to posit a framework of the history of workstations that can be written in the next century (we're all too close to create it); fourth, to summarize my own involvement on interactive computing including timesharing and large personal computers (both styles of use led to personal workstations); finally, to record my work on Digital's VAX Homogeneous Computing Environment that was totally announced last year. I led the architecture for this environment over the decade from 1973 to 1982 and was strongly influenced by the personal workstation computing movement including Ethernet. This work hasn't been described outside of product brochures.

REFERENCES

• 1: Bell, C.G., "The Multi: A New Class of Multlprocessor Computers", Science Vol 228, No. 4698, 26 April 1985, 462-467.
• 2: Bell, C.G., H.Burkhardt, S.Emmerich, A.Anzelmo, R.Moore, D.Schanin, l.Nassi, and C.Rupp, "The Encore Continuum: A Complete Distributed workstatlon-Multprocessor Computing Enviroment", AFIPS Conference Proceeding, 1985, Vol 54, 147-155.
• 3: Bell, C.G., G.Fujlsaki, J.M.Heinz, A.S.Stevens, and A.S.House, "Reduction of Speech Spectra by Analysis-by-Synthesis Techniques", The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol 33, No. 12, 1961, pp1725-1736.
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• 5: C. Gordon Bell , A. C. Newell, Computer structures: Readings and examples (McGraw-Hill computer science series), McGraw-Hill Pub. Co., 1971
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• 8: J. Howlett , Gian Carlo Rota , Nicholas Metropolis, History of Computing in the Twentieth Century, Academic Press, Inc., Orlando, FL, 1980
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INDEX TERMS

Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.4 INPUT/OUTPUT AND DATA COMMUNICATIONS

  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.6 Programming Environments
          Subjects: Interactive environments

  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.2 User/Machine Systems
          Subjects: Human factors

  K. Computing Milieux

General Terms:
Human Factors