Re: Charles Murray "The Plan" ends poverty

Alvin E. Toda wrote:

On Wed, 4 Apr 2007, Islander wrote:

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.


I think that you have just proved my point about the nerdyness of this history. Most would not identify with these historic milestones. I substitute teach and I would rougly estimate that 1% or less of the graduating class is going into sceience, math, or engineering in college. The overwhelming majority that will eventually go into a technical trade or engineering are those that go into the military and learn a skill there. There is not even a wood shop anymore. It's used for storage and health classes.

Regarding your history, I think that you should mention the sneak circuit analysis s/w that Boeing has. I heard about this about 25-30 years ago when it was a well established methodology with them. I've had some experience with large systems in which the wrong circuit bounce in a switch or relay could set some relays to chatter and the system to wildly respond. By experience technicians know which relays to tap with a screwdriver to stop the chatter and which switches or relays to replace to fix it-- not that there's anything wrong with the relay or switch.

BTW even a wrong replacement with make before break for a break before make switch could be disasterous. I would guess that the Airbus delay might be due to some of these sneak circuits? These sneak circuits might make their appearance at the bottom of the bathtub curve of wear for the relay. They tend to appear late. The early problems are caught by the design team during initial testing.

I think that the success of Boeing's airplanes have been their sensitivity to these types of problems and ability to get it right the first time. Wish I still had stock in the company. But for a while it seemed like Airbus was the future. I think that Airbus is an example, where good marketing, imagination and creativity gets zapped by the wrong screw in the right hole.

Interesting. I thought that anti-bounce circuitry was one of the first things that one learned on the job.

Speaking of relays, one of my first projects was to build a circuit test controller. I picked relays because of the variety of different circuit interfaces that were needed. I used about 100 relays configured as a two phase shift register. Each stage set up a particular test and the shift sequence could be programmed. It sounded like a sewing machine.

We built three of them and the tech who wired the back panels was a real artist. The wires were bundled perfectly parallel and laced neatly. He was the ultimate in believing that a job done well is a job done right.
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