Materials in this sub-series encompass roughly two periods. The Computer Systems Laboratory's (CSL) work on macromodular computer systems design, led by Wesley A. Clark and Charles E. Molnar, was a forerunner of the research on asynchronous, or clockless, computing undertaken by Jerome R. Cox, Jr., in the 2000s. The issue of metastability failure--that is, data arriving out of sync with a computer clock--was known to result in a "glitch" as early as 1965, a problem tackled by CSL staff members Severo Ornstein, Mishell Stucki, and Thomas Chaney in the 1960s and 1970s, and by Molnar in the 1980s and 1990s. Some of the materials collected here relate to this history of metastability research.
Cox began to revisit asynchronous computing research after a symposium held at Washington University on March 26, 2004. The "Clockless Computing: Coordinating Billions of Transistors" symposium was part of events commemorating the 150th anniversary of the University's founding. It also coincided with the 30th anniversary of the completion of the CSL project on Macromodule Computer Design. This renewed research resulted in several patent applications and led Cox and several colleagues to establish Blendics, LLC, in 2007.