> MIPS (and Hennessy and Patterson) would be my first choice, for upending the architecture design. I agree that it was a revolutionary design for the time. Fr

> MIPS (and Hennessy and Patterson) would be my first choice, for upending the architecture design. I agree that it was a revolutionary design for the time. From today's perspective, some of the choices made did not age all that well (in particular branch and load delay slots). For assembly level programming/debugging, my favorite architecture by far was POWER/PowerPC. Looking at x86 code vs PowerPC after Apple's switch made me almost cry, although the performance benefits were undeniable.