As a young computer-science professor at Stanford in the early 1980s, John Hennessy helped pioneer a new computing concept called RISC, for “reduced instruction set computer.” He expected others to see the value of the idea and commercialize it. When no one did, Hennessy started a company called MIPS.

"We never intended to be entrepreneurs," Hennessy says. "I thought what we were doing was so compelling our friends in industry would implement it. But there was too much of a 'not invented here' syndrome. That's why we ended up doing it."

Across San Francisco Bay, David Patterson was working on similar ideas at the University of California Berkeley. He later helped Sun Microsystems turn his team's work into its flagship SPARC line of chips.

Wednesday, Hennessy and Patterson were awarded the Turing Award, computing’s equivalent of a Nobel Prize for their work on RISC. The two didn’t invent RISC themselves. They and their teams built on existing research, but they popularized the ideas and helped prove they were feasible, and Patterson's team coined the term RISC.

Patterson describes computer architecture as the vocabulary that hardware and software use to talk with each other. Before RISC, he says, those architectures tended to be highly complex and full of the digital equivalent of polysyllabic words. What he and Hennessy did was essentially streamline the vocabulary to use only monosyllabic words.

David Patterson helped Sun Microsystems turn his team's work into its flagship SPARC line of chips. Weinberg-Clark Photography/Association for Computing Machinery

This streamlined architecture quickly found a home in embedded devices, servers, and, until Apple switched to Intel processors in 2005, Macintosh computers. Today RISC is best known for powering most smartphones, thanks in large part to the chip company Arm Holdings, designers of the line of chips called ARM, short for Advanced RISC Machine. The company’s chips are also found in connected cars, drones, and a wide variety of gadgets that need low-energy processors.

Hennessy and Patterson didn't start out collaborating. But the pair say their papers influenced each other, and they later teamed up to author a textbook called Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, published in 1989. The approach detailed in the book, which is still used in computer architecture classes today, was possibly even more influential than their RISC research.

Patterson describes the textbooks that came before as "catalogs" that simply explained what different types of computers did, but didn't provide any unified design principles. With their book, Patterson and Hennessy established a set of principles for evaluating the performance of different architectures, taking much of the guesswork out of designing computers. Forest Baskett, a partner at the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates and former Stanford computer science professor, says Hennessy and Patterson established computer architecture as a engineering discipline and influenced chipmakers like Intel that don't make RISC processors.