The Computer Chronicles - Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) (1986)

Gary Kildall was one of the best man of the times for computers when it was fun to work on computers and made it interesting to learn . Now days it just internet surfing and google and apple taking over along with microsoft . IBM had good computers in the past but didn't spend the money too keep up with the general publics needs and what they liked .

I think modern computing is gotten boring and there no fun in it anymore .

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I was born in 1981. The growth of computers felt like the wild west during my formative years.

Tonight, I'm watching this episode of old school TV on my OLED smartphone.

To think we went from this level of journalism in the computer world to the modern day grifters like LInus Tech Tips.....

Remarkably prescient episode. Practically all of the points made for and against RISC have been born out since then. The 90's saw an explosion of RISC based chips from IBM, DEC, HP, ARM, and even Intel. All of them featured long pipelines, large register sets. The point about the efficient use of silicon really is what eventually sold RISC as the technology that would succeed over CISC.

I would love to go back in time and explain to these people about AI

There is an episode of Computer Chronicles in which Intel states something like "we don't see any major competition from RISC architecture". Bwahahahaha

RISC machines were designed to work for people who have as little knowledge of computers as possible.

So, um, when am I going to be able to get those molecular computers to repair my brain!?

Greetings from the future where symbolic AI is essentially dead.

Meanwhile in lab in Cambridge, England

How many are watching this on a new custom ARM Mac in 2023? Apple Silicon is amazing.

I find it amazing that they had these discussions in 1986.

I don't understand who the audience was for this. How was this ever on TV, it's so niche.

From 1986, but now we see modern phones and computers using RISC processors.

RISC is good...but who knows one day RISC will go to the dark path by enlarging its instruction set in order to gain more speed...

So much foretold here

I wish Gary could see the computers today.

Wild watching this knowing what RISC became. For those of you who don’t know, all iPhones, iPads, and M-series Macs are RISC computers

George Morrow's comment negative about "Keep making new instructions sets. And that's like inventing a New Typeface every time you want to say something." Reality is they become a New Typeface using much fewer words to say what you want. Also, regarding figuring out to run anyone's computer binary without recompiling. IBM did that with something called Object Observability that included the Source Language with the Compiled Language so when the program was moved to an updated processor, the Object Code saved as modified.

RISC architecture is going to change everything

No one wanted to say how fast are these RISC machines vs 386 16MHz. Would be nice to hear performance figures and best with clocks to assess IPC

copycats....god created computers these copycat isnindiabdbdnvdhajdisiannshadiigovthdhjsbanah companies cheating with god....god definately punishes liars....

What strikes me the most about this video, is that even though we are living in way more technologically advanced society, you will almost never hear such filled with technical terms talk on mainstream media broadcasts today.

Even though the computer technology massively improved, the average user technical knowledge level has plummeted in parallel.

Ahh that glorious pan am 747.. HEY!! BE NICE TO THE DC3!!

Gary's happy face is a treat!

RISC, in the end, won the battle. Things like the new Apple chip aren't even nails in the coffin but flowers over the grave. ARM is everywhere - on cell phones and wifi dongles. The fact that it's entering servers and PCs just now is what gives the impression the Intel x86 family rules the CPU world.

“No such thing as RISC architecture”, lol, devices such as iPhones and such use RISC architecture

George Morrow's last comment was absolutely dead on.

"Eventually we're going to get down to point where silcion's important, and there RISC machines win on silicon better than the CISC."

We're down to NM processes now. Silicon is more important now than ever. RISC is showing that it's able to operate more effeciently than CISC at the smaller processes, with less silicon needed to do so successfully.

I guess this RISC approach will fail due to lacking support of BASIC.

RISC is good!
-Crash Override

While RISC is huge today, it was fascinating to see just how accurate Jan Lewis's evaluation / prediction of RISC was for 1986 given the realities of the time.

This show should've kept going. It's like the computer version of Motorweek

While we are on the topic of risc and cisc, one must conclude the juvenile thinking then behind the Pentium 4. Not that PPC 970 was honestly much smarter with having these complex, long instruction pipelines. This idea might be ok for streaming for example but as a general use CPU these long pipeline architectures do very little to move instructions along in the real world as recognized by the amount of energy and heat that one of these CPUs produce. Yes by adding pipelines one could ramp up the speed of such architectures fairly well. But we all know or at least by now should know just because a CPU is clocked very high doesn't mean it can handle instructions efficiently, risc or cisc. To me on paper I could see before it was tested that it probably would require very careful recoding of instructions, modern video cards ironically have GPUs with very deep pipelines because they can achieve two things a high speed combined with a very fast streaming, something the chips like the netbust, I mean netburst architecture was very good at. So in a way it wasn't all for a loss. Sadly the PPC architecture was very efficient at very low watts before the IBM 970. True the 970 brought power pc in to the 2000's with things like true DDR memory support and 64-bit computing, very advanced. But it did so at a real unfortunate cost. I believe they should have worked with the company that took over for Motorola to update the G4. That could have been a much better idea. But...

I loved tuning into computer chronicles back in the 80's and 90's. Love watching these old episodes in 2022.

If only Gary could have seen the technology today, even just in our phones.

SGI anyone

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Gary Kildall was left handed!? No wonder CP/M has such a sinister feel about it.

A much younger David Patterson appears in this episode. Didn't seem to tout the power savings of using RISC because it wasn't until roughly a quarter of a century later this became important for tablets and smartphones.

It's crazy how x86 (basically) was already bloated by 1986 standard.
Yet here we are nearly 40 years later and are still complaining about it.
Yet we still get the Steam Deck with x86_64.
Lessons learned: "If something is broken you either fix it now, or you're most likely never going to fix it".

ARM processors and Apple M1 are RISC CPUs

Watching here 2022

I am commenting from the future: You were right, RISC architecture was and still is your future. Thanks guys!

WOW Now Apple M1 uses RISC