> I was a bit puzzled by the IBM 801 That didn't show as a link when I read it (shows as a link on my current device). Apologies for the oversight; I edited m

> I was a bit puzzled by the IBM 801 That didn't show as a link when I read it (shows as a link on my current device). Apologies for the oversight; I edited my comment. The 801 was an insightful jump from then-current trends in processor design and that insight, to me, is what RISC is all about. There were lean and orthogonal instruction sets already (most notably, to me, the PDP-6/10 and Seymour Cray's work at CDC) but the central idea of offloading a lot of heavy lifting to the compiler (and recognizing Multics' insight of writing an OS in a HLL, pointing to a practically assembly-language free future) was groundbreaking, a kind of Special Relativity of computing.