Wikipedia
MOSIS (Metal Oxide Semiconductor Implementation Service) is probably the oldest (1981) integrated circuit (IC) foundry service and one of the first Internet services other than supercomputing services and basic infrastructure such as E-mail or File Transfer Protocol (FTP).
MOSIS is operated by the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California (USC). MOSIS merges multiple IC designs submitted by both companies and universities onto multi-project wafers (MPW) to share the cost of fabrication among multiple users.
MOSIS has prototyped more than 50 000 chip designs for private businesses, government agencies, research agencies and universities. Between 1990 and 2003, some 66 539 students learned chip design in MOSIS-associated programs and a total of 13 734 designs were fabricated.
Many of the early users of MOSIS were students using IC layout techniques from the seminal book Introduction to VLSI Design (ISBN 0-201-04358-0) published in 1980 by Caltech professors Carver Mead and Lynn Conway.
Some early reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processors such as MIPS (1984) and SPARC (1987) were run through MOSIS during their early design and testing phases.