SCS Distinguished Alumni Lecture Series
Ed Frank, NeTpower Corporation
"Follow the Money: A Look at Past and Future Trends in the
Computer Industry"
12 October 1995 --- Wean Hall 7500 --- 4:00 pm
ABSTRACT: During Watergate, "Deep Throat" told Woodward and Bernstein to
"Follow the Money" in order to discover the truth and unravel the conspiracy.
John Doerr, a general partner at the Bay Area venture capital firm of
KPCB, has suggested that "Follow the Money" is a good way to predict
major trends in the computer industry as well. In this talk I explore this
thesis both historically and as a predictor of future trends, examining what
it says about the future of operating systems, microprocessors, networking,
and other aspects of the industry. I'll also discuss what it means for
researchers in Computer Science, as well as what it has meant to myself and
many of our CMU alumni over the past 30 years.
SPEAKER BIO: Dr. Edward H. Frank received his PhD in Computer
Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1985 in the area of VLSI systems.
He joined the engineering staff of Sun Microsystems in 1988, where he was a
Distinguished Engineer. At Sun he was co-architect of the SPARCstation 10
(along with CMU alumnus and Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim). He was also a
founding member, along with CMU Alumnus James Gosling, of Sun's "Green"
Project, which was devoted to the development of technology for consumer
electronics, and provided the roots for Gosling's Hot Java Web browser.
Upon leaving Sun in 1993, Dr. Frank co-founded and is currently Vice
President of Engineering at NeTpower, a leading developer and supplier
of high-performance MIPS RISC based workstations and servers for running
Microsoft Windows NT.