Re: Charles Murray "The Plan" ends poverty

Alvin E. Toda wrote:

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This is interesting history. I'm sure someone will write about it someday. But I guess the general interest will be nil-- outside of program developers and users. It's too "nerdy" a topic.

The early days of electronic design automation are indeed interesting and if someone is going to write a history they had better hurry up. Some of the pioneers have already died.

Few people know, for example, that Marlon Wagner developed one of the first if not the first design automation program. This was in the late '50s and it was used to produce wiring lists for the NSA special purpose machines of that era. It ran on a machine called Bogart a vacuum tube machine built at NSA IIRC.

Cray published the first reference to Design Automation in a speculative paper published in an early computing conference where he predicted that one day computers would be used to design computers. I've got the citation around somewhere.

Gwen Hayes published the seminal paper on logic simulation reporting on a digital simulator that she wrote at Westinghouse in '62.

Ivan Sutherland developed the first Computer Aided Design graphics program at Lincoln Lab in 1962 -- Sketchpad

Donald Durr of RCA developed the first automated placement and wire routing program (PRF) for LSI circuits in '65, I think. This was funded by NSA based on knowledge of the work that Wagner had done earlier. NSA installed a Gerber photo plotter to produce masks at 200x and used a program called ARTGEN developed by *** Nodo of RCA which was a marvel in affine geometry. *** was nearly blind, but an amazingly creative programmer. Durr later went to work at NSA and worked for me during the '70s.

There was also work underway in automatic placement and routing at TI at the time. The developers knew about each other, but as far as I know the efforts were completely independent.

NSA was an amazing place in the '60s and '70s and was well ahead of the SoA. I wish that more of that work had been published, but the effort to get approval to publish at NSA was daunting. At one point, you had to get 15 signatures to approve publishing a technical paper.

SIGDA of the ACM has attempted to preserve all the early literature of Design Automation and has most of this on CDs. Unfortunately some of the earliest work was reported at meetings that had no proceedings and some of the work done at IBM, Bell Labs, and TI was considered to be confidential and was not published. I knew many of the pioneers from their participation in professional meetings in the '70s when I was active in various ACM and IEEE groups.
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