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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2025 03:31:13 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: Taughannock Networks
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Originator: johnl@iecc.com (John Levine)

According to Lynn Wheeler  <lynn@garlic.com>:
>John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> writes:
>> 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've claimed that John Cocke did RISC/801
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cocke_(computer_scientist)
>https://www.ibm.com/history/john-cocke
>The effort to develop RISC began in 1974, when IBM tasked Cocke and a
>team of researchers with creating an exchange controller to automate
>telephone switching -- ...

The Berkeley RISC work started in 1978 but as far as I know the 801 and RISC
projects were unaware of each other. They made similar observations that most
programs used only a small fraction of the instructions on the computers they
were using (Vax and 360 resepectively) so how about building something simple
that just had the useful instructions and ran really fast.

The projects were different in some important ways.  Most notably the 801 was
developed in tandem with the state of the art PL.8 compiler, while Berkeley
used the not very sophisticated PCC compiler.  Berkeley invented register
windows to deal with PCCs simplistic register management, while the PL.8
compiler optimized away most register saves so the 801 didn't need anything
beyond regular loads and stores.

-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly