An early textbook in microprocessor design
written by Steven K. Roberts (1981)
Prentice-Hall • ISBN 0-13-459461-4

I spent most of 1981 deeply immersed in this textbook project, which was not only the distillation of a few years of industrial control system design, but also an impassioned statement about where we were headed… including artificial intelligence. This was not a normal textbook; it rejected the “ideal world” that usually appears in such tomes, and interleaved the passion of system design with the tools that make machines dance.

Photo by Ben Willmore, May 2011

The book is the origin of my signature quote (“Art without engineering is dreaming; engineering without art is calculating”) and for the past few decades I have been wanting to get it into machine-readable form. While some of the specific technology is now quaint, I wrote it with exactly that issue in mind… and I am happy to say 43 years later that it is mostly timeless where it matters most (and has had some wonderful reviews).

This page provides a framework for the chapters as I capture them on the Czur ET24 book scanner in my digitizing lab, and they will be added to the timeline below as they are completed. Each links to a page with the full text and scans of the ink-on-mylar images, then returns here. This project may take a while, but it is an important part of my publishing legacy.

Posted in Articles by SKR