jax@well.sf.ca.us (Jack J. Woehr) (10/02/90)
Embedded Systems Conference Retrospective Tuesday evening a few moments before midnight I stepped off the airline at San Francisco airport, happy survivor of a rough flight through a few hundred miles of Rocky Mountain thunderstorms. A rent-a-car, a cheap motel, a night's sleep, and in the morning the Hyatt Regency and the second annual Embedded Systems Conference sponsored by "Embedded Systems Programming" magazine. In the ballrooms and conference rooms of this piece of America-riche architectural genius not much less remarkable than the Hanging Gardens of Babylon was met a very focussed and pleasant selection of the practitioners of the art of control programming. Tool vendors, hardware vendors, gurus, novices, journalists, ideologues to the muster of about a thousand souls all told visited about one hundred booths and attended scores of lectures, panels and discussions over a four-day period on subjects such as the management of Forth projects, the selection of onboard Unix kernels, programming the AMD 29000, and the legal aspects of embedded systems. Attendees got to hobnob with industry "celebs" such as Plauger, Kelly-Bootle and Rather. I was gratified to find in my first lecture, "Forth and Embedded Systems", sixty persons of whom only seven were already Forth programmers. Later that evening I observed to Tyler Sperry, editor of "Embedded Systems", that his periodical had done more for Forth in the former's two years of existence than all other Forth journals had done combined over the past five years. The Embedded Systems Conference was something very close to what all Forthers had wished for years that the now-abandoned FIG Conventions would become. The difference between the overwhelming success of the Embedded Systems Conference and the FIG Conventions is, in my view, twofold. First of all we have the catholicity of the ES Conference: C systems, chip vendors, emulator peddlers, ADA programmers, ASM programmers BASIC programmers, C programmers, Forth programmers all meeting together to speak the common tongue of control programming. Secondly we have the impressive marketing and targeting skills of a renowned publisher of controlled circulation trade magazines. Miller Freeman is an organization that seems to know its audience intimately. The Conference was impressively well-attended and well-managed. It was packed with neat toys, clever hacks, slick concepts, grandstanding product announcements and just good ol' folks. My last act before hopping the plane back to the beloved hills of Golden, Colorado was to reserve a booth for my company, Vesta Technology, for next year's session at the Santa Clara Convention Center.