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> On Jul 11, 2015, at 8:42 AM, Rhialto <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> I recall reading that the whole RISC thing was more or less started with
> compiler writes for the 360 noticin that in practice they only used a
> rather limited subset of the available instructions

Not quite true. What started was a paper by an IBM fellow (John Cox).  What 
John noted was that most of the 360/370 systems used a micro architecture below 
the basic 360 ISA. This micro architecture was always simpler.  By this time 
the assembler vs HLL debate was pretty much over and people were writing in at 
least systems programming languages (C, PL/360, BLISS much less fortran PL/1 
and the like).  John asked since we were using optimizing compilers would it 
not make more sense for the compiler to just target the microengine directly.  

Patterson looked at Cox's work at took the next step.  Let get rid of 
microengine and reduce the basic instruction set.  The term RISC was coined in 
Dave's paper and the debate was started 😅

Clem
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