Imagesource: https://spectrum.ieee.org/

1989 was a crazy year. Voyager 2 passed Neptune, the Exxon Valdez ran aground and lost 240000 barrels of oil, and in November - more or less due to a slip of the tongue by a member of the East German government - the Iron Curtain fell, which meant the end of the Cold War as well as of almost all communist countries.

What. A. Year.

In the same year, Intel worked on a RISC CPU. And the one they worked on had it all. To be exact, it had 1 million transistors in it. And it also was in direct competition with the x86 architecture, which was favored by Intel not only at that time.

The history of this CPU is not as widely known as it is interesting. Therefore Tekla Perry grabbed the topic for spectrum.ieee.org, researched it in detail as usual, and wrote it all down straight away. 🖋

There's not necessarily anything technical to learn in her article, but the reading time is definitely well spent, should you be looking for a few minutes of nostalgic relaxation and distraction.

As always, high quality content.