Background
In the early 1980s DEC was a huge success, flush with cash and infused with a feeling of invincibility. Projects were started all over the company to chase the "next big thing", with little or no overall direction or managerial oversight. RISC computing was one of those next big things, and in the period from 1982 to 1985 no fewer than four attempts were made to create a RISC chip at different divisions.
Titan from DEC's Western Research Laboratory (WRL) in Palo Alto, California was a high-performance ECL based design that started in 1982, intended to run Unix. SAFE (Streamlined Architecture for Fast Execution) was a 64-bit design that started the same year, designed by Alan Kotok (of Spacewar! fame) and Dave Orbits and intended to run VMS. HR-32 (Hudson, RISC, 32-bit) started in 1984 by Rich Witek and Dan Dobberpuhl at the Hudson fab, intended to be used as a co-processor in VAX machine. The same year Dave Cutler started the CASCADE project at DECwest in Bellevue, Washington.
Read more about this topic: DEC Prism
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