31 Dec
2015
31 Dec
'15
11:58 p.m.
On Thu, 31 Dec 2015, Larry McVoy wrote:
Any chance this was code that turned into the
Ousterhout stuff, I think it
was called spice?
While I am not involved with it at all, I did interview a couple
developers toward my BSD history book. (The following is from my 3BSD
"Welcome to Virtual Vax/UNIX" chapter.)
\textsc{Spice} 2\index{SPICE}, the Simulation Program with Integrated
Circuit Emphasis, was another program that benefited from the VAX work.
This Fortran program predicted the electrical characteristics of an
integrated circuit. Spearheaded by professor Donald O.
Pederson\index{Pederson, Donald O.}, who helped establish a fabrication
lab --- the first integrated circuit fabrication facility at any
university\cite{donpederson2005} --- in the 1960's, it was developed by
the integrated circuits group of the Electronics Research Laboratory and
the Electrical Engineering department [at University of California at
Berkeley] in the mid 1970's.
To many it is considered the first significant open source program.
The program was available free of charge, for
not-for-profit uses to any interested party.
% above CITE archives/1970s/3bsd/usr/src/cmd/spice/roots.f
Its source code was distributed for the cost of writing the
tape and copying the documentation, so it was decided to
include it on the BSD distribution tape as well.\cite{tom-quarles-1}
\textsc{Spice} was originally developed to run as a batch program in
punched-card form on the university's CDC 6400 system outputting to a
132-column line printer, but its default allocation of 400,000 double
precision numbers in an array wouldn't work with the PDP-11. It was
later ported to many operating systems and machines that had adequate
memory and floating point capabilities, such as VMS and Unix on the
VAX.\cite{tom-quarles-1}
The program shipped with BSD provided general-purpose circuit
simulation for nonlinear DC, nonlinear transient, and linear AC
analyses. Circuits could contain resistors, capacitors, inductors,
mutual inductors, independent voltage and current sources, four
types of dependent sources, transmission lines, and the four most
common semiconductor devices: diodes, bjts, jfets, and
mosfets.\cite{spice-vax-guide-1979}
% ALSO same in archives/1970s/3bsd/usr/man/man1/spice.1
Virtually every electronic chip --- even today --- used \textsc{Spice}
or one of its derivatives at critical stages during its
design.\cite{donpederson2005} In fact, its name has become
a verb in the industry: ``let's \textsc{Spice} that circuit
and see if it works!''