Foonlies

[Al Kossow]

On 1/31/18 12:25 PM, Al Kossow via cctalk wrote:
> 
> 
> On 1/31/18 11:27 AM, Lars Brinkhoff via cctalk wrote:
>>  There was
>>   also a fourth whose role (I think) was to build the CAD system which
>>   was used for the design. He later went to work for DEC.
> 
> SUDS (Stanford University Design System)
                            Drawing

http://www.scaruffi.com/svhistory/sil9.html

Electronic Design Automation
The S-1 project to build a supercomputer was started by the astrophysicist Lowell Wood at the Lawrence Livermore
National Lab in 1975, first ran a program in 1978 and continued until 1988. Two Stanford students, Tom McWilliams and
Curt Widdoes, were recruited to develop SCALD (Structured Computer-Aided Logic Design), an influential language to
design computers, written in Pascal on DEC's PDP10  SCALD was based on the Stanford University Drawing System (SUDS)
developed at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL) first by Phil Petit in 1969 on the PDP10 in assembly
language) and later by Richard Helliwell. Petit moved to DEC and used SUDS to design the DEC KL-10 of 1973. Therefore
SUDS became the first Computer Aided Design (CAD) system used to design an actual computer. Later Bechtolsheim used SUDS
to design the SUN boards at SAIL. SCALD jumpstarted a whole new field, Electronic Design Automation (EDA) for electrical
engineering and electronics. Tom McWilliams and Curt Widdoes started a company, initially called SCALD Corporation and
later Valid Logic Systems, in 1981 in San Jose to sell SCALD on a proprietary UNIX workstation. At the same time, also
in 1981 but in Mountain View, Aryeh Finegold and David Stamm used the public-domain source code for SCALD to found Daisy
Systems, that also required a specialized workstation running its own Unix-like operating system. Several notable
Silicon Valley founders (e.g. Vinod Khosla, Harvey Jones, Don Smith, Tony Zingale, Mike Schuh, George Haber, Dave
Millman and Rick Carlson) started out at Daisy Systems. The third pioneer of EDA was Mentor Graphics, founded in 1981 in
Oregon by Tektronix engineers (Tom Bruggere, Gerry Langeler and Dave Moffenbeier) and the only one that didn't require
specialized hardware (it ran on regular Unix workstations).



"released into the public domain in 1978."

BFD. No one has a copy today.