CISC - Complex Instruction Set Computers
- IBM 360/370
- DEC VAX

- designed for machines with core memory
- core memory access was slow, compared to cpu
- therefore, do a lot while you have info in cpu
- leads to lots of complex instructions

- lots of instructions also made compiling easier

Overview by Bill Joy

1970's John Cocke, IBM
- compilers are advancing
- fewer instructions with more loads and stores could operate faster than 370
- 1979 experimental IBM 801
- 1986 IBM-RT, commercial failure

1980 RISC - Reduced Instruction Set Computers
- project by David Patterson at UC Berkeley
- motivated by rumors of the IBM 801

1981 MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second)
- project by John Hennessy at Stanford

Sales of PC's, VAXen, System/370 are going strong....

1987 Sun introduces SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture)
- it's a RISC chip based on Patterson's design
- it works
- SUN licenses the SPARC design
- SPARC history

MIPS Computer Systems
- chips to DEC, Silicon Graphics

1990 IBM R/6000

Motorola, IBM, Apple - PowerPC

1. William Aspray, ed., Computing Before Computers (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1990 ). Also available online at http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/DocumentArchive/Documents/Books/Computing Before Computers/CBC.html (Computer History Museum, accessed 2004 Aug 11).

2. Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray. Computer: A History of the Information Machine (Basic Books, 1996).

3. Paul E. Ceruzzi. A History of Modern Computing (MIT Press, 2000).

4. Paul E. Ceruzzi, Reckoners, the Prehistory of the Digital Computer, from Relays to the Stored Program Concept, 1935-1945 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983). Also available online at http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/DocumentArchive/Documents/Books/Reckoners/Reckoners.html (Computer History Museum, accessed 2003 Sep 27).