selected a gate-array technology for the first SPARC implementation. It was a 20,000 gate chip running at 16 MHz, with a performance of about 10 MIPS. Fujitsu delivered the first chips in April 1986, a year before the SPARC architecture was officially announced! Sun waited until July 1987 to announce the SPARC architecture so that it could announce the first complete SPARC systems at the same time - the Sun-4/200 family.HP's Precision ArchitectureHewlett-Packard's Precision Architecture (PA-RISC) was another early commercial RISC. It was a relatively conservative design, with a load store architecture and 64 registers (32 int + 32 fp). PA-RISC had an unusually large instruction set for a RISC, partly because the initial design took place before the RISC philosophy was popular. Despite this, it was a simple design and the first implementation only had 115,000 transistors. PA-RISC processors were used in HP's UNIX workstations, which became quite popular and reached a 25% share of the workstation market.The C++ Programming LanguageBack at AT&T Bell Labs, things hadn't stood still. Several new versions of UNIX had been written, and the C language had been undergoing ANSI standardization. But by far the most interesting thing to happen at Bell Labs in the late 1980's was the emergence of the C++ language as the refined, object oriented successor to C.Early versions of the C++ language, collectively known as C with Classes, had been in use within Bell Labs since as far back as 1980. The language was originally invented because its creator, Bjarne Stroustrup, wanted to write some event driven simulations for which the Simula language would have been ideal except for speed. So he wrote a front end preprocessor which allowed Simula style classes to be implemented efficiently in C. This was similar in concept to how RATFOR added structured programming to FORTAN, but in this case Stroustrup was adding object oriented features to C. Stroustrup's ...
