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From: vallor <vallor@cultnix.org>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: CISC did not die in 1990 (was: Re: The joy of FORTRAN)
Date: 26 Feb 2025 14:01:37 GMT
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On Wed, 26 Feb 2025 02:28:40 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro
<ldo@nz.invalid> wrote in <vplu8o$292c7$5@dont-email.me>:

> On Wed, 26 Feb 2025 00:20:41 -0000 (UTC), John Levine wrote:
> 
>> The VAX was developed over a decade later, when they put thousands of
>> transistors on each logic chip and thousands of bits in each memory
>> chip. It suffered from a severe case of second system syndrome, where
>> they started from the elegant PDP-11 and added every feature a
>> programmer could ever possibly want, with less than fabulous
>> performance to match. There's a reason that the VAX inspired RISC
>> systems.
> 
> I think RISC development started about concurrently with the origins of
> VAX. And VAX remained a popular system until about the late 1980s, when
> RISC finally came to everyone’s notice. Having VAX as an example of how
> not to do things no doubt helped popularize the concept. ;)
> 
> The “big bang” for RISC was about 1988-1990, when a bunch of Unix
> workstation vendors brought out machines based on MIPS, SPARC, PA-RISC,
> and of course POWER. And there was Acorn with ARM (not sure if that was
> used for any Unix workstations at the time). At that point, the writing
> was on the wall for CISC.

1990 was two years before 1992, when Linux was a new thing.  I still have
"worklog" files from the Fall semester of 1992 when I built a
student-access Unix shell host, running on an HP Vectra RS/20 -- a
386 machine, and very much CISC.

It started with 2 Megs (yes, Megs) of RAM, and was later expanded
to 16 Megs.  Used the MCC Interim Linux distribution:

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCC_Interim_Linux

The original networking was SLIP to a KA9Q NOS box on our network,
then we purchased a Western Digital 8003 Ethernet card, which was
the only NIC (at the time) for which Linux had a driver.

-- 
-Scott
$ ll project.wpd 
-rwxr-xr-x 1 scott scott 5087 Mar 29  1992 project.wpd
(Just read that document -- boy, was I naive then. ;)