Re: The joy of FORTRAN

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.