Mead & Conway revolution
Carver Mead + Lynn Conway's book Introduction to VLSI Systems (1980) democratised IC design — universities could suddenly teach chip design.
"Lambda" design rules abstracted away process-specific details. The MOSIS project (1981) gave students prototype access to real foundries. Enabled the first wave of fabless startups: Sun, MIPS, Acorn, SGI. Lynn Conway is also famous as a trans-rights pioneer and Out-and-Proud 1999 coming-out.