The Great Quux's Lisp Microprocessor is the big one on the left of the second image, and you can see his name "(C) 1978 GUY L STEELE JR" if you zoom in. David's project is in the lower right corner of the first image, and you can see his name "LEVITT" if you zoom way in.
The final sanity check before maskmaking:
A wall-sized overall check plot made at Xerox PARC from Arpanet-transmitted design files,
showing the student design projects merged into multiproject chip set.
One of the wafers just off the HP fab line containing the MIT'78 VLSI design projects:
Wafers were then diced into chips, and the chips packaged and wire bonded
to specific projects, which were then tested back at M.I.T.
We present a design for a class of computers whose “instruction sets” are based on LISP. LISP, like traditional stored-program machine languages and unlike most high-level languages, conceptually stores programs and data in the same way and explicitly allows programs to be manipulated as data, and so is a suitable basis for a stored-program computer architecture. LISP differs from traditional machine languages in that the program/data storage is conceptually an unordered set of linked record structures of various sizes, rather than an ordered, indexable vector of integers or bit fields of fixed size. An instruction set can be designed for programs expressed as trees of record structures. A processor can interpret these program trees in a recursive fashion and provide automatic storage management for the record structures. We discuss a small-scale prototype VLSI microprocessor which has been designed and fabricated, containing a sufficiently complete instruction interpreter to execute small programs and a rudimentary storage allocator.
Just 29 days after the design deadline time at the end of the courses, packaged custom wire-bonded chips were shipped back to all the MPC79 designers. Many of these worked as planned, and the overall activity was a great success. I'll now project photos of several interesting MPC79 projects. First is one of the multiproject chips produced by students and faculty researchers at Stanford University (Fig. 5). Among these is the first prototype of the "Geometry Engine", a high performance computer graphics image-generation system, designed by Jim Clark. That project has since evolved into a very interesting architectural exploration and development project.[9]
Figure 5. Photo of MPC79 Die-Type BK (containing projects from Stanford University):
The text itself passed through drafts, became a manuscript, went on to become a published text. Design environments evolved from primitive CIF editors and CIF plotting software on to include all sorts of advanced symbolic layout generators and analysis aids. Some new architectural paradigms have begun to similarly evolve. An example is the series of designs produced by the OM project here at Caltech. At MIT there has been the work on evolving the LISP microprocessors [3,10]. At Stanford, Jim Clark's prototype geometry engine, done as a project for MPC79, has gone on to become the basis of a very powerful graphics processing system architecture [9], involving a later iteration of his prototype plus new work by Marc Hannah on an image memory processor [20].
[...]
For example, the early circuit extractor work done by Clark Baker [16] at MIT became very widely known because Clark made access to the program available to a number of people in the network community. From Clark's viewpoint, this further tested the program and validated the concepts involved. But Clark's use of the network made many, many people aware of what the concept was about. The extractor proved so useful that knowledge about it propagated very rapidly through the community. (Another factor may have been the clever and often bizarre error-messages that Clark's program generated when it found an error in a user's design!)
9. J. Clark, "A VLSI Geometry Processor for Graphics", Computer, Vol. 13, No. 7, July, 1980.
[...]
The above is all from Lynn Conway's fascinating web site, which includes her great book "VLSI Reminiscence" available for free:
These photos look very beautiful to me, and it's interesting to scroll around the hires image of the Quux's Lisp Microprocessor while looking at the map from page 22 that I linked to above. There really isn't that much too it, so even though it's the biggest one, it really isn't all that complicated, so I'd say that "SIMPLE" graffiti is not totally inappropriate. (It's microcoded, and you can actually see the rough but semi-regular "texture" of the code!)
This paper has lots more beautiful Vintage VLSI Porn, if you're into that kind of stuff like I am:
A full color hires image of the chip including James Clark's Geometry Engine is on page 23, model "MPC79BK", upside down in the upper right corner, "Geometry Engine (C) 1979 James Clark", with a close-up "centerfold spread" on page 27.
Is the "document chip" on page 20, model "MPC79AH", a hardware implementation of Literate Programming?
If somebody catches you looking at page 27, you can quickly flip to page 20, and tell them that you only look at Vintage VLSI Porn Magazines for the articles!
There is quite literally a Playboy Bunny logo on page 21, model "MPC79B1", so who knows what else you might find in there by zooming in and scrolling around stuff like the "infamous buffalo chip"?
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/MIT78.html
My friend David Levitt is crouching down in this class photo so his big 1978 hair doesn't block Guy Steele's face:
The class photo is in two parts, left and right:
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Class2s.jp... http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Class3s.jp...
Here are hires images of the two halves of the chip the class made:
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/InstGuide/MIT78c...
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/InstGuide/MIT78c...
The Great Quux's Lisp Microprocessor is the big one on the left of the second image, and you can see his name "(C) 1978 GUY L STEELE JR" if you zoom in. David's project is in the lower right corner of the first image, and you can see his name "LEVITT" if you zoom way in.
Here is a photo of a chalkboard with status of the various projects: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Status%20E...
The final sanity check before maskmaking: A wall-sized overall check plot made at Xerox PARC from Arpanet-transmitted design files, showing the student design projects merged into multiproject chip set.
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Checkplot%...
One of the wafers just off the HP fab line containing the MIT'78 VLSI design projects: Wafers were then diced into chips, and the chips packaged and wire bonded to specific projects, which were then tested back at M.I.T.
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Wafer%20s....
Design of a LISP-based microprocessor http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=359031 ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AIM-514.pdf
Page 22 has a map of the processor layout: http://i.imgur.com/zwaJMQC.jpg
We present a design for a class of computers whose “instruction sets” are based on LISP. LISP, like traditional stored-program machine languages and unlike most high-level languages, conceptually stores programs and data in the same way and explicitly allows programs to be manipulated as data, and so is a suitable basis for a stored-program computer architecture. LISP differs from traditional machine languages in that the program/data storage is conceptually an unordered set of linked record structures of various sizes, rather than an ordered, indexable vector of integers or bit fields of fixed size. An instruction set can be designed for programs expressed as trees of record structures. A processor can interpret these program trees in a recursive fashion and provide automatic storage management for the record structures. We discuss a small-scale prototype VLSI microprocessor which has been designed and fabricated, containing a sufficiently complete instruction interpreter to execute small programs and a rudimentary storage allocator.