Lynn Conway co-wrote "the book" on VLSI design, "Introduction to VLSI Systems", created and taught this historic VLSI Design Course in 1978, which was the first time students designed and fabricated their own integrated circuits, including James Clark (SGI) who made the Geometry Engine, and Guy L Steel (MIT) who made the Scheme Microprocessor. She invented superscalar architecture at IBM, just to be fired in 1968 aft…
I ended up teaching Carver Mead's course in its last year at Caltech, which was quite an experience. In many ways, the course was (and is) horribly out of date, and not just because of the fact that students were using open-source Berkeley tools to draw layouts. The real reason why this course was obsolete was that Mead and Conway so thoroughly won the argument on the idea of creating rigorous abstractions that peopl…
Excerpts - text in double parentheses provided for context:
"Lynn Conway and I," Fairbairn remembered, "were the ones who said, 'This VLSI is hot shit.'"
For the next year, Caltech and PARC educated each other. Mead transferred his theories about microelectronics and computer science, and Conway and Fairbairn paid him back by developing design methods and tools giving engineers the ability to create integrated circuits of unprecedented complexity on Alto-sized workstations.
...If the computer lab -- particularly ((Butler)) Lampson, who commanded management's respect -- continued to carp at the money being spent on the hazy potential of VLSI, who knew how long she could survive at PARC?...
While discussing this one day with Mead and Fairbairn she realized the problem was not just scientific, but cultural. VLSI had not been around long enough even to generate textbooks and college courses -- the paraphernalia of sound science that, she was convinced, would force everyone else to take it seriously.
"We should write the book," she told Mead. "A book that communicates the simplest, most elegant rules and methods for VLSI design would make it look like a mature, proven science, like anything does if it's been around for the ten or fifteen years you normally have behind a textbook."
Mead was skeptical...
That's where you're wrong, she replied. What was the aim of all the technology that surrounded them at PARC, if not to facilitate just the project she was proposing? They had Altos ((computer workstations)) running Bravo ((word processor)), a network to link long-distance collaborators, and high-speed laser-driven Dover printers to produce professional-looking manuscripts.
Their collaboration that summer on what became the seminal text of the new technology was only one of Conway's efforts to distill and spread the VLSI gospel. The same year she agreed to teach a guest course at MIT (using the first few chapters of the still-maturing textbook), then printed up her lecture notes for instructors at an ever-enlarging circle of interested universities. By mid-1979 she was able to offer an additional incentive to a dozen schools: If they would transmit student designs to PARC over the ARPANET, PARC would arrange to have the chips built, packaged, and returned to the students for testing.
((Jim)) Clark understood at once that the computing efficiency VLSI offered was the key to expanding the potential of computer graphics. That summer he essentially relocated to PARC, taking over a vacant office next door to Conway's and steeping himself in VLSI lore. Within four months he had finished the Geometry Engine chip, the product of that summer's total immersion.