Interactions, Impacts, and Coincidences of the First Golden Age of Computer Architecture

In their 2018 Turing Award lecture and 2019 paper, John Hennessy and David Patterson reviewed computer architecture progress since the 1960s. They projected a second golden age akin to the first, approximately 1986–1996, when new instruction set architectures, almost all reduced instruction set computers (RISCs), revolutionized the industry, eliminated most minicomputer vendors, rivaled mainframes, and began a takeover of supercomputing. The C language and derivatives came to pervade systems programming, whereas Unix derivatives came to run many servers, desktops, and smartphones. Such outcomes were not inevitable but depended on evolutionary interactions of computer architecture and languages, industry dynamics, and sometimes random coincidences.