Lynn Once More

I wrote about these 2 people before. Have read more about them lately.

Today everybody takes cheap hardware for granted, availability and cheapness a byproduct of science and capitalism. It is not that automatic! Brickwalls can deviate development a lot. Had not some people like these two used a liberal public science funding climate (mainly by US armed forces first and desparate corporations later) in due time, it could be very much different.

Some of us could still be programmers or digital designers or publishers, few in academia and most in large hierarchical companies hacking and typing away at large mainframes, cheap thinnest clients and expensive workstations and competing for more "processing" time. The personal desktop and mobile computing device could by far be not as ubiquitous or at least a lot more blackboxy.

These people bridged the gap between logic and solid state physics through their cooperation, mostly by writing a book called “Introduction to VLSI Systems”. Now computing is nearly everywhere. They made a difference and most of the time we forget how big it is. Open software can only grow on cheap hardware.

To quote from an article The Economist did on Mead because of his Foveon activities: On Ms Conway's urging, several of the early chapters were made available well before the book was finished, so that engineering schools could teach the principles of VLSI. The authors also devised a mechanism that enabled university laboratories to make prototype chips rapidly. This strategy was wildly successful.