In article ,
says...
On Sat, 24 May 2008 00:05:16 +0000 (UTC), Rick Jones
wrote:

I am reasonably confident that DEC did not invent RISC. I'm not sure
if IBM invented the concept of RISC,

RISC was one of those "in the air" concepts that several groups invented
independently. Probably the best candidate for first inventor is David
Paterson of UC/Berkeley. If nothing else, he was the guy who coined the
name RISC.

In addition to inventing the current style of CPUs, Paterson also
invented the current style of high-performance disk systems: RAID. He's
also responsible for the "smart disk" style that has made Netezza
successful.


"The first system that would today be known as RISC was not at the
time; it was the CDC 6600 supercomputer, designed in 1964 by Jim
Thornton and Seymour Cray. [...]

Another early load-store machine was the Data General Nova
minicomputer, designed in 1968.

Early, but not first. The PDP-5 predated not just the Nova but also the
CDC-6600. The -5 has an even more reduced instruction set than the CDC
-- just eight opcodes. An updated version of the -5 was the PDP-8. The
head engineer of the -8 quit DEC to found Data General where he (Edson
d'Castro) designed the Nova. So the Nova, although a RISC machine,
wasn't the first of the kind. DEC has a clear claim to early RISC
machine with the -5, although you can spend way too much time debating
the details of the definition of RISC.

There is something ironic about the fact that the two most notable RISC
machines were both the smallest, slowest, cheapest computer (PDP-5/8) of
its era, and the biggest, baddest, fastest computer of its era (CDC).

Even better: these two machines were the first two computers I ever
programmed.
--
Kevin Willoughby lid

Kansas City, this was Air Force One. Will you change
our call sign to SAM 27000? -- Col. Ralph Albertazzie