ETH Zurich has a long history of building its own hardware. The Lilith system was built using AMD2900-series bit slice components. It was inspired by Nicklaus

ETH Zurich has a long history of building its own hardware. The Lilith system was built using AMD2900-series bit slice components. It was inspired by Nicklaus Wirth's sabbatical at Xerox PARC, where he was exposed to the Xerox Alto. IIRC, several hundred were built and used, including for the development of Modula-2. It was later followed by the Ceres systems, initially an NS32000-based system, used for example as the host for Oberon development. As Alan Kay says: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”