BCS Edinburgh Branch

A View from the Crow's Nest

Nick Shelness

Lotus Development Corporation

Wednesday 14 April 1999. 6.00pm

Royal Museum of Scotland Lecture Theatre, Lothian Street

Slides from talk in Freelance format.
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Nick Shelness is a Lotus Fellow and Vice President and serves as Lotus' Chief Technology Officer (CTO). As CTO, he has senior management responsibility for Lotus' future technology direction, and serves as the conduit between Lotus' world-wide technical community and its senior management. Prior to being appointed Lotus CTO, Nick served in a number of technical leadership roles, primarily in the messaging arena, for which he was made a Lotus Fellow. Before its acquisition by Lotus, Nick spent over ten years in a number of technical and marketing roles with Soft-Switch inc. He spent the 1970s as a tenured member of faculty of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Edinburgh. Though nominally based at Lotus' HQ in Cambridge Mass, Nick lives and tele-commutes from a renovated, late 17th century, corn mill in the Strathmore region of rural Scotland.

In this talk, Nick looks at current computer hardware, communications, and market trends, and rather than attempting to predict the future (which is a mug's game), asks what are some possible implications, if these trends continue.