The first Stanford MIPS project started as a special graduate course in 1981. That project produced working silicon in 1983 and a prototype for running small programs in early 1984. After that, we declared it a success and decided to move on to the next project-MIPS-X. This book is the final and complete word on MIPS-X. The initial design of MIPS-X was formulated in 1984 beginning in the Spring. At that time, we were unsure that RISe technology was going to have the industrial impact that we felt it should. We also knew of a number of architectural and implementation flaws in the Stanford MIPS machine. We believed that a new processor could achieve a performance level of over 10 times a VAX 11/780, and that a microprocessor of this performance level would convince academic skeptics of the value of the RISe approach. We were concerned that the flaws in the original RISe design might overshadow the core ideas, or that attempts to industrialize the technology would repeat the mistakes of the first generation designs. MIPS-X was targeted to eliminate the flaws in the first generation de signs and to boost the performance level by over a factor of five."

Two enemies, a Japanese scientist's wife and a Chinese peasant woman, were drawn together in an unusual situation during the Sino-Japanese war (1937-1945). Their daughters grew up together and became inseparable. When the war ended, all Japanese were repatriated back to Japan. Not wanting to subject an innocent child to the unknown harsh life of a post-war Japan, the young scientist couple left their daughter in China to be cared for by the Chinese peasant. As soon as the relationship between China and the United States returned to normal, this Japanese couple returned to China to look for their long-lost daughter. This is a story about conflicting emotions: friendship and animosity, love and hatred, kindness and cruelty, trust and betrayal.

Her feet were bound and then unbound. Her father's hair changed from a cue to a crew cut. Three revolutions, one civil war and two world wars later, China went from a feudal society to communism. Liberated? Armed with a western education the world had changed under her feet, but how does she walk in this new world? The footprints of her small feet could be found imprinted on China's history.

When the Nazis in Germany were rounding up the Jews for the labor camps and the rest of the world were refusing to accept these refugees, a tailor sneaked his family out of Vienna with the help of a Gypsy family. They ended up in Venice and boarded an ocean-going vessel. Thirty-eight days later, they arrived in Shanghai and found themselves immersed in a world of totally different culture and religious beliefs. They were spared of Hitler's slaughter. But were they going to lose their own culture and tradition? This is the story of their struggles for survival.