The First RISC: John Cocke and the IBM 801
When I worked at IBM in the early 2000&#x27;s I occasionally remember hearing people say &quot;IBM invented RISC!&quot;. As a young pup I knew to keep my mouth shut, but in my head I was like &quot;best keep that news to yourself pop, the rest of the world only knows about the history of RISC-V&quot; which is the only RISC we learned about in technical school in the late 90&#x27;s. I didn&#x27;t doubt IBM did something similar early on though, but it just came across to me as another funny IBM community knowledge thing that was a little off-base which wasn&#x27;t too uncommon anyway. Obviously the IBM old timers were not off-base though.<p>But it is nice to see history recognizing earlier pioneers in the field like John Cocke. And this article also demonstrates something I found perplexing as a young pup: IBM&#x27;s marketing department dictated what engineering did. Obviously the point of the company is to make solutions that customers want to pay money for. Just because engineering has a better solution doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s the best fit for customers (or the most profitable solution to the problem). But with my head stuck in FOSS philosophy of the day it was a good education in real life.