Bridging worlds: chips, code, and cosmos
1975 – 1984
The cart, first developed in 1961, was updated in 1979 with a camera on a mechanical swivel to make it fully autonomous. It rolled at a consistent walking pace, following a white line. This tracking system worked sometimes, but inconsistencies in lighting, visual interference from other objects, or an abrupt curve could all throw the cart off course. In 1979, the cart successfully made its way 20 meters through a chair-strewn room in five hours without human intervention. | The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
by Andrew Myers
The last five years have shown a dramatic increase, percentage-wise, in the number of women in Stanford Engineering. . . . The most important factor is that if a woman wants to become an engineer, she can.
— Assistant Dean Alfred Kirkland, 1975
1975 – 1984
The world saw the rise of the microprocessor, the advent of the personal computer, and the spread of computer networking linking the globe during the sixth decade of the School of Engineering. Stanford engineers explored the vastness of outer space, the confines of the nanoscale, and the fragile, finite resources of planet Earth.
Rumblings on campus
The San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which caused considerable damage across Stanford’s campus, inspired a rich tradition of earthquake studies and innovative research. Not long after the quake, members of the Department of Mechanical Engineering built a shaking table that was used by F. J. Rogers, an assistant professor of physics, “with the hope of offering some explanation, based directly on experiment, of the greater destructiveness of earthquakes in regions where the foundations of structures are supported by more or less soft ground than where these foundations are based on solid rock.”(1)
By the 1930s, earthquake studies focused on modern analyses and design approaches as well as on the education of a new generation of engineers. One of those students, John A. Blume (AB ’33, PhD ’67), became known as the “Father of Earthquake Engineering.” The John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center, which was dedicated by the Department of Civil Engineering in 1975, endures as a leading center of earthquake and structural research.(2)
Engineering Corner, 1974. The new shield design for the School of Engineering, introduced in 1967, was added to the building in the early 1970s, before the school moved into its new home in the Terman Engineering Center in 1977. The mascle (diamond with the center removed) framework is orange, engineering’s academic color, on a blue background, denoting Stanford Engineering’s commitment to graduate education. The triple redwood fronds, found on all Stanford University heraldry, symbolize, first, “the organization, transmission, and generation of knowledge which takes place in the School and on which the scholarly growth of engineering depends,” and, second, “the tripartite character of Stanford’s School of Engineering—students, faculty, and alumni.” | Special Collections & University Archives.
Haresh Shah, codirector of the John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center (left), shows John Blume one of the center’s testing machines. Since its founding, with help from a generous endowment from Blume, the Blume Center has functioned as the umbrella for all earthquake engineering activities at Stanford University. | Stanford News Service.
Haresh Shah (left) and James Gere, 1974. Shah and Gere served as codirectors of the Blume Earthquake Engineering Center from 1974 to 1985. | Stanford News Service.
Women choose engineering
Since Laura Virginia Austin had become the first woman to earn an engineering degree at Stanford in 1923, women continued to pursue a profession that has not always been welcoming to them. By the early 1970s, even amid the feminist movement and the push for equal rights, Stanford had conferred only 190 engineering degrees on women. That circumstance began to change when Stanford Engineering undertook a concerted effort to recruit women.
“The last five years have shown a dramatic increase, percentage-wise, in the number of women in Stanford Engineering,” wrote Assistant Dean Alfred Kirkland in 1975, noting that Stanford was part of a national trend.(3) Roughly only 500 women nationwide were earning BS degrees in engineering each year. At Stanford, the master’s program saw a dramatic increase. In 1967, a class of 497 had contained just one female master’s graduate. By 1975, that number had leapt to 24. Undergraduates followed suit. By 1979, a quarter of all engineering undergraduates were women, and engineering had become the number-one field of choice for women at Stanford.(4)“The most important factor is that if a woman wants to become an engineer, she can,” Kirkland wrote.(5)
Engineering students with Professor Haresh Shah (right), May 1972. Stanford Engineering undertook a concerted effort to recruit women starting in the early 1970s. By 1979, a quarter of all engineering undergraduates were women, and engineering had become the number-one field of choice for women at Stanford. | Stanford News Service.
Facing budget woes
The effort to recruit women came even as the School of Engineering faced a 25 percent across-the-board budget cut in 1975. Dean Kays wrote to The Stanford Daily detailing how he would approach cuts. “The general budget squeeze during the last five years has taken virtually all of the fat out of the budget and there is no question that further reductions are going to hurt,” he wrote. Addressing the grim possibility of faculty layoffs, Kays was forthright: “It is quite possible to do very severe violence to the quality and reputation of the School of Engineering.”(6)
From left to right, Ralph Merkle (U.C. Berkeley), Martin Hellman (Electrical Engineering), and Whitfield Diffie (EE graduate student and collaborator with Hellman), 1977. In 1976 Hellman and Diffie published the first public-key data encryption technology, a discovery that is viewed as the birth of modern cryptography. Hellman and Diffie won the 2015 A.M. Turing Award for this work. | Chuck Painter/Stanford News Service.
Amid the broad nationwide economic struggles of the mid-1970s, students across the university began to lean toward job-oriented majors, to engineering’s benefit. Between 1972 and 1976, the number of undergraduates in engineering more than doubled, from 249 to 563. Notable again was a rise in the number of women in engineering, rocketing almost five-fold from 22 to 101 in the same period.(7)
Public-key cryptography
In 1976, computer scientists Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie announced the world’s first public-key data encryption technology. Their research had faced heavy opposition from the National Security Agency, which held that In 1976, computer scientists Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie announced the world’s first public-key data encryption technology. Their research had faced heavy opposition from the National Security Agency, which held that
Decades later, the pair would share the 2015 A.M. Turing Award. Remarking on their win, Dan Boneh, professor of computer science and electrical engineering and codirector of the Stanford Cyber Initiative, said, “Billions of people all over the planet use the Diffie-Hellman protocol on a daily basis to establish secure connections to their banks, e-commerce sites, e-mail servers, and the cloud.”(13)
An Unlikely Friendship
Martin Hellman, 1978. Hellman earned graduate degrees in electrical engineering at Stanford (MS ’67, PhD ’69), and returned to join the faculty in 1971. He became professor emeritus in 1996. | Chuck Painter/Stanford News Service.
Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, 1983. Inman became director of the NSA in 1977 and served for four years. In 1981 he became deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, retiring in 1982. | CIA/Wikimedia Commons.
In late 1977 or early 1978, Martin Hellman, professor of electrical engineering, received an unexpected phone call from the National Security Agency (NSA).
“Admiral Inman, the director, will be in your area in a couple of weeks,” the voice on the line told him. “If you’re willing, he’d like to meet with you.”
Hellman and Inman were strangers to each other, but presumed enemies, duking it out in “shadowboxing” matches held in the arenas of Congress and the press—a confrontation between academia and government that became known as the first “crypto war.”(8)
In one corner: Hellman and Whitfield Diffie, a research assistant in his lab, who had in 1976 coauthored a revolutionary paper, “New Directions in Cryptography.”(9)
The paper had introduced public-key cryptography, providing a method for secure, private communication over open channels without prearranged keys, a concept that facilitated the creation of digital signatures and certificates critical to current Internet security and e-commerce. Decades later, Hellman and Diffie would be honored with the 2015 A. M. Turing Award.
In the other corner: Admiral Bobby Ray Inman and the NSA, who stood firm against publication of the paper on the grounds that cryptography belonged solely in the realm of government agencies, and that public dissemination of these techniques would compromise national security by making high-grade encryption accessible to adversaries.(10)
So strong was the NSA’s opposition to the paper that, after its publication, the agency attempted to limit its distribution, and warned the publishers that the authors had violated U.S. laws restricting export of military weapons, for which the authors could be subject to prison time.(11) Despite these threats, Hellman and his team persisted, arguing for the necessity of public cryptographic research to protect private-sector information and prevent government overreach.
“The lesson is: it’s better to have friends than enemies,” Hellman said, “which everybody agrees to, but how many people take the risk that Inman did?”(12)"
— Martin Hellman
When the opportunity came to face Inman directly, Hellman “jump[ed] at the opportunity,” and told the caller, “I’d love to meet with him.”
Two weeks later, Inman showed up at Hellman’s office in the Durand building, room 135. “He smiles. He looks at me and he looks at the top of my head . . . and he says, ‘It’s nice to see you don’t have horns,’ which is what people at NSA were telling him: I’m the devil incarnate,” Hellman recalled.
Hellman had been using similar terms to describe Inman. He returned Inman’s look and said, “Same here.”
Inman told Hellman he was meeting with him “against the advice of all the other senior people at the agency, but I don’t see the harm in talking.”
In our modern age of political polarization and social media showdowns, such a meeting seems remarkable. Inman’s highest concern was still the impact of public cryptographic knowledge on national security, but their meeting made an inroad that allowed him to see the importance of Hellman’s work in the emerging digital age. The NSA’s attempts to control cryptographic research ultimately failed, and public-key cryptography became the backbone of modern Internet security.
“Out of that meeting grew a cautious relationship, which eventually became a friendship,” said Hellman. In later years, Inman would go on to sign two statements of support for Hellman’s work on national security, the most recent of which focused on fundamental changes needed to address the dangers of nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity.
—Julie Greicius
A new home for engineering
The School of Engineering took occupancy of the $9.2 million Frederick E. Terman Engineering Center in 1977. The second building to be named in honor of the school’s third dean, this one was on the west side of campus, a short walk from the Terman Laboratory that faced Engineering Corner. The new building housed the dean’s office, along with the Departments of Civil Engineering, Industrial Engineering, Engineering-Economic Systems, Operations Research, and the Design Division of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. In addition to its laboratories, offices, conference rooms, and classrooms were a 260-seat lecture hall, the engineering library, and a computing room with thirty-one terminals. Made possible by donations from Terman’s former students William Hewlett and David Packard, the building was expected to serve the engineering community “for 100 years or more.”(14) But only thirty years later, the Terman Engineering Center was in dire need of replacement due to termite damage and wood rot. In 2012, it would be not so much demolished as dismantled, with 99.6 percent of its materials repurposed in building projects elsewhere on campus.(15)
In the same year that the Terman Engineering Center opened, the Department of Industrial Engineering reflected its growing influence with the addition of “Engineering Management” to its mission, becoming the Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM).
Center for integrated systems
As chipmaking became an enterprise of paramount importance, the challenges of the process grew too great for a single discipline. Modern integrated systems required the skills of computer architects, circuit engineers, materials engineers, physicists, computer scientists, and more. In 1978, a quartet of engineers—Michael Flynn, future dean James Gibbons, John Linvill, and James Meindl—founded the multidisciplinary Center for Integrated Systems (CIS) to pioneer new chips, new methods of manufacture, and new relationships between the School of Engineering and Silicon Valley.(16)
“We began to ask if the worlds of software and hardware were going to merge, so a particular problem might be best solved with hardware only, software only, or a combination, and we didn’t want to say in advance what that combination might be,” Gibbons said. “We had a group of ten stars who all wanted to be part of this.”(17) Remarking on the unique collaborations fostered in the Center, he added that by creating a “triangle between a faculty member, a student, and now, a co-advisor in industry, you get something you could never get any other way.”(18)
Airplanes and autonomy
In 1983, Nicholas Hoff became only the second Stanford faculty member— after William Durand—to be honored with the Daniel Guggenheim Medal for his contributions to aeronautics. Hoff’s theory of elastic stability and its application to aerospace structures had significantly advanced the understanding of how materials and structures behave under stress, enabling safer and more efficient aircraft and spacecraft.
Across campus, work advanced at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL). In 1979, PhD student Hans Moravec, collaborating with robotic arm inventor Victor Scheinman, further modified the Stanford Cart, first introduced in 1961, to perform autonomously. They fitted the cart with a camera on a mechanical swivel and multi-ocular vision that allowed it to navigate, albeit slowly, past obstacles. Pausing for fifteen minutes at a stretch, the Stanford Cart would plot a course and then surge forward in one-meter steps.(19)
Improving computing efficiency
In 1981, weary of the overly complex code clogging modern processors, electrical engineer and future Stanford president John L. Hennessy and collaborator David Patterson of U.C. Berkeley unveiled the microprocessor without interlocked pipeline stages (MIPS) based on their reduced instruction set computer (RISC) protocol. MIPS required far fewer transistors than commercially available microprocessors but ran five times faster. The inventors shared the 2017 Turing Award. Today, virtually all tablets, phones, and smart devices run on RISC architectures.(20)
Also in 1981, electrical engineer James Clark, in the Computer Systems Laboratory, debuted his Geometry Engine, revolutionizing digital 3D graphics. The hardware accelerator could display and rotate digitized objects every thirtieth of a second. Clark would soon found the company Silicon Graphics.
The following year, 1982, Andreas Bechtolsheim, an electrical engineer, joined Vaughan Pratt, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering, and several Stanford students to cofound Sun Microsystems. The name “Sun” is an acronym of Stanford University Network, Bechtolsheim’s doctoral project at Stanford.
Left to right: Stanford computer scientists John Shott, John Hennessy, and James D. Meindl. Hennessy established the microprocessor without interlocked pipeline stages (MIPS) project to develop computers with simpler instruction sets that could be completed in less time. This group developed the reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture, for which Hennessy and U.C. Berkeley collaborator David Patterson won the 2017 A. M. Turing Award. Today, virtually all tablets, phones, and smart devices run on RISC architectures. | Chuck Painter/Stanford News Service.
End of an era
Late in 1982, after a transformational career that began in 1927, Fred Terman died of a heart attack at his home on campus. The San Francisco Chronicle summed up Terman’s influence in a simple headline: “Stanford’s Terman Dies—He Launched Silicon Valley.” The Stanford Daily called him the “father of the modern School of Engineering.” In his eulogy, Stanford President Donald Kennedy recalled that Terman’s “capacity to think about the future was the most remarkable thing about him.” Dean Kays noted, “He took a reasonably good school and turned it into one of the best in the country.”(21) In an interview only a year before his death, Terman had assessed his tenure with characteristic modesty: “There really wasn’t much to it. I had a technique—you get the best people, the best people do the research, and it falls into place.”(22)
French President François Mitterrand visits the Center for Integrated Systems (CIS) to learn about the emerging economic powerhouse called Silicon Valley, 1984. As a collaboration between Stanford and industry, CIS allowed faculty and graduate students from engineering, computer science, and applied physics to work on projects of interest to the microelectronics and computer science industries. From left to right: mainframe pioneer Gene Amdahl, Professor John Linvill, Intel cofounder Robert Noyce, Mitterrand, Vice Provost Gerald Lieberman, Professor James Meindl, Apple founder Steve Jobs, Nobel laureate and Professor Paul Berg, Genentech Chairman Thomas Perkins, Hewlett-Packard President John Young, venture capitalist (and future Stanford trustee) Burton McMurtry, and Professor Edward Feigenbaum. | Special Collections & University Archives.
New space for chip making
For much of its early history, the Center for Integrated Systems had been relegated to the basement of the McCullough Building, but in 1983 the group broke ground for a new home. In 1985, CIS moved into a facility dedicated to bridging multiple disciplines.(23) It included a 10,500-square-foot integrated circuit fabrication lab.(24) Such a “fab” at a university was revolutionary. As a collaboration between Stanford and industry, it allowed faculty and graduate students from engineering, computer science, and applied physics to work on projects of interest to the microelectronics and computer science industries.
Future dean James Plummer recalled that the CIS space was an experiment, part social and part technical. The concept of housing various disciplines in one building ran “completely counter” to traditional university models, he said, and continues to do so at many institutions.(25)
A new dean
In 1984, the final year of the sixth decade of the Stanford School of Engineering, Dean William Kays handed the reins to CIS founder James Gibbons, who would serve for a then-record-breaking twelve-year tenure. The son of a prison warden, Gibbons had earned his PhD in 1956 at Stanford, where he was the first liaison between Stanford and Shockley Semiconductor. Gibbons joined the electrical engineering faculty a year later.
“When I was asked to be dean, I was, first of all, very, very surprised. . . . I thought, ‘Well, OK, at least they want me for what I might regard as the right reason, so maybe I’ve got a chance to do this,’” Gibbons later recalled, noting that one of his objectives had been to make contributions to Silicon Valley.(26)
In the years ahead, Gibbons would realize those contributions and much more. He would oversee the transition of the Department of Computer Science to the School of Engineering and the creation of the undergraduate computer science major, which eventually became the university’s most popular major by far. He would introduce tutored video instruction and distance learning, extending the reach and scale of engineering education globally and creating new educational opportunities for many, including at-risk teens and young adults at detention centers across the United States. He would launch the innovative Stanford Engineering Venture Fund, strengthening partnerships with Silicon Valley, tripling industrial support for research, and encouraging an entrepreneurial spirit among students and faculty.
Those accomplishments, and more, still lay ahead. Sixty years of advances—including those in seismic science, world-changing Internet ventures, programs to increase student and faculty diversity, and firsts for women in space—had accumulated to position the School of Engineering for exciting, uncharted territory.
View of Escondido Mall from Lomita Mall, with engineering laboratories on the right and Meyer Library in the background, 1985. | Chuck Painter/Stanford News Service.
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