Faster, stronger, better: an artifact of hardware history. The computing dialect Scheme was the primary educational computer programming language in use at MIT for decades. This lot commemorates Gerald Sussman’s pioneering hardware implementation of the language—an innovation that forever altered the world of computing.

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.

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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.

Please note: The buyer of this lot may not deduct any part of the purchase price as a charitable contribution. Access to Github is not guaranteed and is subject to Github's terms of service. This lot is not part of Smithsonian or Cooper Hewitt collections or property.