4/ This became known as "Reduced Instruction Set Computing" or RISC. It was quite counter-intuitive and def ran up against Intel. The raging debate was RISC v CISC.
In grad school we spent hours in classes debating this.
Conversation
5/ First everyone read the now famous Patterson and Ditzel paper "The Case for the Reduced Instruction Set Computer" going back to 1980. Now there was a company starting to seed chips to leading companies called MIPS that was "interesting".
read image description
ALT
1
1
24
6/ With all the excitement and still many companies making "workstations" the debate began to rage. Leading mini computer vendor, DEC, was all up in arms as VAX was big time CISC. So they wrote -- "Comments on "The Case for..." in what today would prob be a HN thread w/1M votes.
read image description
ALT
3
22
7/ Debate raged for a very long time. MIPS worked to make inroads but PC + Intel caused the mini computer and workstation markets to eventually collapse though RISC hung on with IBM Workstations and also markets like printers. But it was so elegant!! Even did Windows NT for MIPS.
read image description
ALT
1
1
24
8/ This was a big deal at Microsoft because we were 100% Intel. It was a core bet for NT...curious that the NT team also came from DEC/VAX world. :-) It also sowed the seeds for NT being cross platform "proven" early on.
4
1
24
10/ In 1984, really early, John then at BYTE Magazine did an *incredibly* deep dive into MIPS from his perch in Silicon Valley.
I am pretty sure this is the first RISC "explainer" outside of academia. It had benchmarks! All pages here from Nov 1984 "Chip Issue"
1
5
45
12/ Also in that issue - the 286 was new. Bill Gates called the chip "brain dead." Microsoft had a heck of time making Windows work well on it (did 286 & 386 versions). IBM+MS really got gummed up w/OS/2 as IBM forced 286 support. PC AT came out in 1985 and all the clones on 286.
2
1
20
13/ RISC v. CISC continued literally for decades. RISC turned into ARM and the whole world of billions of embedded chips. The economics and customization enabled by the business model worked well for devices that could not carry royalties. Then came phones! Then the iPod!
3
2
24
14/ The rest is history. Anyway, wanted to share wonderful BYTE article & debate that raged for decades. Eventually the inventors were proven right and won the Turing award. The arc of innovation is often much longer than we perceive. (Also "Comments on…" always gets me) // END
6
5
36
Show replies

