I am actually part way through reading Mead & Conway's "Introduction to VLSI Systems" right now; I decided to go through it just for history's sake a few weeks ago. It's amazing to imagine that time period, it seemed like they were just creating so many new ideas so fast in a completely new realm; making the tools to build new processors to make the tools faster to make new processors faster... on and on and on. They published the book in 1978. We've been on that roller coaster ever since.

RIP.