In the early 1970s, telephone calls didn’t instantly bounce between handheld devices and cell towers. Back then, the connection process required human operators to laboriously plug cords into the holes of a switchboard. Come 1974, a team of IBM researchers led by John Cocke set out in search of ways to automate the process. They envisioned a telephone exchange controller that would connect 300 calls per second (1 million per hour). Hitting that mark would require tripling or even quadrupling the performance of the company’s fastest mainframe at the time — which would require fundamentally reimagining high-performance computing.
The exchange controller project may have been canceled before it got off the ground, but the team’s underlying work led to the microprocessor architecture called RISC, for reduced instruction set computer. RISC enabled computers to complete tasks using simplified instructions, as quickly as possible. The goal to streamline hardware could be achieved with instruction sets composed of fewer steps for loading, evaluating and storing operations.
The new architecture enabled computers to run much faster than ever before. Its protocols, the foundation of computer evolution up to the present day, have affected everything from PCs and mobile devices to gaming and space travel. Just about all microprocessors derive from RISC architecture, and it is the basis of the multibillion-dollar UNIX systems market.