The decisive influence of women on the development of #LispMachine processors and #Scheme in general is criminally under-discussed:
"We had heard that Lynn Conway from Xerox and Carver Mead from Caltech were making real progress on making it possible for people who were not at a chip-fab facility to specify chips for experimental designs. In the Spring of '78 we invited Lynn Conway to teach the class on #VLSI design that she was working on with Carver Mead. Just a few years earlier Guy L. Steele Jr., (then my graduate student) and I invented a simplified but elegant version of the #LISP family of languages that we called #Scheme. Guy and I wrote a number of internal memos (Lambda the Ultimate...) that later became famous. Guy enrolled in Lynn's class. For his term project he designed and fabricated a direct interpreter for Scheme, called Scheme-78. It didn't quite work (because of three missing wires); it didn't have a garbage collector; and it was too small to do anything impressive; but it encouraged us to try again. Over the next few months Guy Steele, Jack Holloway, and I designed a new interpreter that we thought could actually be run on a real memory and tested with real programs. I designed the register array, Guy and I developed the microcode. Jack made a PLA generator that could hold the microcode, and we roped Alan Bell of #XeroxPARC into assembling the Scheme-79 Chip. We pulled this off in a few man-months of time and it worked! Scheme-79 had a mark-sweep #GarbageCollector with a Deutsch-Schorr-Waite mark algorithm and a two-finger compacting sweep. It also had a two-level microcode: The main PLA contained rather high-level microcode instructions that were further elaborated by a nanocode PLA that operated the register array.
Further encouraged, I started a new project to make a chip that was actually big enough and fast enough to be useful to run real research programs. This was the Scheme-81 chip. It was a 32-bit machine, with 6 bits of type code and 26 bits of address. It had microcode support for everything required to make a Scheme computer operating system, including a stop-and-copy garbage collector, a coprocessor bus, and an interrupt system. For Scheme-81 the microcode was written by Richard Stallman, Chris Hanson, and me. (Steele had graduated and moved on to CMU as faculty.)"
- Sussman
#WomenInTech #TransPride #lgbt
https://www.artsy.net/article/ruse-laboratories-gerald-jay-sussman-creator-of-scheme
blake shaw 🇵🇸 /
npub154…dfaaq
2023-10-01 09:00:08
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"content": "The decisive influence of women on the development of #LispMachine processors and #Scheme in general is criminally under-discussed:\n\n\"We had heard that Lynn Conway from Xerox and Carver Mead from Caltech were making real progress on making it possible for people who were not at a chip-fab facility to specify chips for experimental designs. In the Spring of '78 we invited Lynn Conway to teach the class on #VLSI design that she was working on with Carver Mead. Just a few years earlier Guy L. Steele Jr., (then my graduate student) and I invented a simplified but elegant version of the #LISP family of languages that we called #Scheme. Guy and I wrote a number of internal memos (Lambda the Ultimate...) that later became famous. Guy enrolled in Lynn's class. For his term project he designed and fabricated a direct interpreter for Scheme, called Scheme-78. It didn't quite work (because of three missing wires); it didn't have a garbage collector; and it was too small to do anything impressive; but it encouraged us to try again. Over the next few months Guy Steele, Jack Holloway, and I designed a new interpreter that we thought could actually be run on a real memory and tested with real programs. I designed the register array, Guy and I developed the microcode. Jack made a PLA generator that could hold the microcode, and we roped Alan Bell of #XeroxPARC into assembling the Scheme-79 Chip. We pulled this off in a few man-months of time and it worked! Scheme-79 had a mark-sweep #GarbageCollector with a Deutsch-Schorr-Waite mark algorithm and a two-finger compacting sweep. It also had a two-level microcode: The main PLA contained rather high-level microcode instructions that were further elaborated by a nanocode PLA that operated the register array.\n\nFurther encouraged, I started a new project to make a chip that was actually big enough and fast enough to be useful to run real research programs. This was the Scheme-81 chip. It was a 32-bit machine, with 6 bits of type code and 26 bits of address. It had microcode support for everything required to make a Scheme computer operating system, including a stop-and-copy garbage collector, a coprocessor bus, and an interrupt system. For Scheme-81 the microcode was written by Richard Stallman, Chris Hanson, and me. (Steele had graduated and moved on to CMU as faculty.)\"\n- Sussman\n\n#WomenInTech #TransPride #lgbt\n\nhttps://www.artsy.net/article/ruse-laboratories-gerald-jay-sussman-creator-of-scheme",
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