User:Mdahmke/sandbox

The Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop came about because of a phone call to Fred Coury from an unnamed IEEE member in Los Angeles. The caller said that microcomputers were starting to catch on, and that the IEEE should have a workshop on them. He asked Coury if he would set one up. Coury called his friend Fred Clegg at Santa Clara University, hoping that he would know something about setting up conferences, and also suggest a place to hold one. Ted Laliotis, who, along with Don Senzig, had independently decided to start an IEEE conference on micros and thought they should pool resources and do just one. The workshop was founded in 1975 as an IEEE technical workshop sponsored by the Western Area Committee of the IEEE Computer Society. The first Asilomar Committee meeting was held upstairs at the Menu Tree. Fred Terman was there because he lived in Monterey, and knew how to set up Conferences at Asilomar. He subsequently took responsibility for making arrangements for the conference. The first conference had five sessions, Hardware, Software, Technology, and Applications, and the fifth (Thursday evening) session, was left open for people sign up to talk about whatever they wanted to at the conference itself. Coury volunteered to chair the open session, and did so for the next twenty years. The talks were scheduled for ten minutes each, in the order in which they were signed up for. The session was an instant success, leading some to later refer to it as a "Rich Asilomar Tradition." Jim Warren later shortened it to "The RAT Session." Although the Conference severed its relationship with IEEE long ago, and morphed into the "Asilomar Workshop on Neat Stuff', it has never wavered from its original principles: An invitational meeting of the "movers and shakers" of the industry on the cutting edge of technology. Tightly scheduled, highly interactive formal and informal meetings, no marketing pitches, no non-participating observers, no formal publications, and off-the-record. – Fred Coury The intentional lack of written proceedings and the exclusion of general press representatives was perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of AMW that made it so special and successful. This encouraged the scientists and engineers who were at the cutting edge of the technology, the movers and shakers that shaped Silicon Valley, the designers of the next generation microprocessors, to discuss and debate freely the various issues facing microprocessors. In fact, many features, or lack of, were born during the discussions and debates at AMW. We often referred to AMW and its attendees as the bowels of Silicon Valley, even though attendees came from all over the country, and the world. Another characteristic that made AMW special was the "required" participation and contribution by all attendees. Every applicant to attend AMW had to convince the committee that he had something to contribute by speaking during one of the sessions or during the open mike session. In the event that someone slipped through and was there only to listen, that person was not invited back the following year. -- Ted Laliotis, AMW founder and first chairperson