S-1 Timeline

Last update: October 2009

... under construction ...
corrections are welcome

1970

• C.mmp design starts at CMU

1973

• Summer - Curt Widdoes works with Lowell Wood at LLNL
• Fall - Widdoes starts the PhD program at Stanford

1974

• Widdoes works on Minerva multiprocessor design using SUDS (Stanford University Drawing Systems) on the SAIL PDP-10 system

1975

• O Group started at LLNL, headed by Wood
• Summer - Tom McWilliams works with Wood at LLNL, and Wood encourages him to meet Widdoes
• Fall - McWilliams starts the PhD program at Stanford
• Fall - McWilliams and Widdoes develop instruction set and multiprocessor structure

• Cm* design starts at CMU

1976

• Spring - McWilliams and Widdoes used SUDS on the SAIL PDP-10 system to start drawing logic diagrams and developed the SCALD language to describe the design hierarchically
• Summer - wire lister was too demanding for a summer research associate to complete
• Fall - McWilliams and Widdoes began implementation of SCALD I on IBM 370/168 at SLAC

• Cray-1

1977

• Spring - bulk of SCALD I complete
• Summer - physical design subsystem, including simulation of signal waveforms
• Fall - final S-1 Mark I wire list

1978

• Spring - additional personnel join the project, including Mike Farmwald and Jeff Rubin, for debugging Mark I and for OS
  
• Summer - Mark I ran first significant program and single-user OS
• SCALD papers presented at DAC
• Fall - work begins on Mark II and SCALD II

1979

• Spring - Ted Anderson and Daniel Weinreb join project also at this time (?): Jeff Broughton, Hon Wah Chin, Charles Frankston, and Lee Parks
• Chin is OS team leader

1980

• Spring - S-1 paper presented at Spring COMPCON
• Spring - McWilliams dissertation, May 1980
• Fall - Widdoes dissertation, December 1980
• Fall - Weinreb returns to MIT; Parks also leaves; Earl Killian and Jay Pattin join the project

• Broughton becomes OS team leader

• DARPA funding for VLSI research at Stanford, led by Forest Baskett and Jim Clark

1981

• McWilliams, Rubin, and Widdoes start Valid Logic Systems
• Fall - Farmwald dissertation, August 1981 (Farmwald was also on Hertz Foundation fellowship; graduated BS Math Purdue in 1974)

• John Hennessy starts work on MIPS research project
• BBN Butterfly; Cosmic Cube design begins at Caltech

1982

• Broughton becomes S-1 project director

• Forest Baskett leaves Stanford CSD to start DEC WRL, which develops the 32-bit RISC Titan in ECL 100K MSI parts
• Cray X-MP; Alliant and Convex founded

1983

• DARPA SCI
• Fujistu VP-200, NEC SX-1; Encore, ETA, Myrias, NCube, Sequent, and Thinking Machines founded

1984

• McWilliams and Widdoes receive IEEE W. Wallace McDowell Award
• William Broad visits Livermore while researching his book

• Hennessy takes sabbatical leave and co-founds MIPS Computer Systems with John Moussouris and Skip Stritter

1985

• Killian leaves S-1 project for MIPS

• Convex C-1, Cray-2

1985

1986

• Encore Multimax, Sequent Balance, TMC CM-1; KSR founded

1987

• TMC CM-2; SSI founded

1988

• Anderson continued to work on Amber until 1988
• Haussman retired

• Cray Y-MP, Sequent Symmetry

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mark@cs.clemson.edu