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The Scheme-81 Chips

1 2020-11-21 16:34

https://www.artsy.net/artwork/gerald-sussman-scheme

In an imagined future academic discipline called the Archaeology of Computer Science, the Scheme-81 chip may be regarded as an artifact on par with the Diamond Sutra.

The computing dialect Scheme—created in the 1970s by Gerald Sussman and his doctoral student Guy L. Steele Jr.—was the primary educational computer programming language in use at MIT for decades, a tool by which untold numbers of influential computer scientists were taught how to render algorithms in the form of elegant code. Then in the 1980s, Sussman and his team took it up a notch.

Moving forward from Scheme, hitherto confined to the software realm, the Sussman-led group conceived a hardware implementation of the language. The chip that resulted from their work, in 1981, represents one of the first efforts to apply artificial intelligence technology to the computer-aided design of integrated circuits. Here were algorithms expressed as hardware; wires doing the work of code—and without this the world we know today would not exist. Scheme, along with its parent language Lisp, led to many now-commonplace technologies—including laser printing, windowing systems, computer mice, high-resolution bit-mapped graphics, and computer graphic rendering. Here were algorithms expressed as hardware, wires doing the work of code—and without this, the world we know today would not exist.

Read the technologist's statement. [https://www.artsy.net/post/ruse-laboratories-gerald-sussman]

This lot includes two Scheme-81 computer chips, signed by Gerald Sussman. This lot also includes a commemorative 3D-printed Babylonian styled tablet containing the password to a private Github repository where the buyer may access an image of the Scheme-81 chips. The tablet is in two parts with combined dimensions 6.9 x 3.4 x .76 in.

Be sure to read Sussman's statement and despair at how close we were to a Scheme Machine. Sad!

They also had the original assembly code for Abelson's turtle graphics: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/hal-abelson-turtle-geometry

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