In the early 1970s, many advocated smaller, fuel-efficient cars after the Arab Oil embargo of 1973 terrified car-addicted America. The Volkswagen bug, already a fixture on the American highway, gained further praise as U.S. car manufacturers struggled to relearn how to build cars. E. F. Schumacher's 1973 book "Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered" was the bible of this trend in technology and economics. As a result of this tumultuous decade, cars are generally much smaller today than they were in 1969.

Computers are smaller, too, but instead of having less power than their 1960s cousins, they have much more. However part of this increase in power, expressed both in speed and memory size and computational complexity (for instance almost all chips today can do floating point operations in addition to integer), has been due to a "back to basics" movement that said "small is beautiful," especially small instruction sets. We call this philosophy of computer architecture RISC for Reduced Instruction Set Computers.

RISC has always been around. The very first digital computers would qualify as RISCs. However, the term came into existence in 1980 when a design group at Berkeley led by David Patterson and Carol Sequin created a VLSI chip which they called the RISC I. In 1981, a group at Stanford led by John Hennessy created a similar chip called the MIPS (Microprocessor without Interlocking Pipe Stages.)

IBM got in on the act with a minicomputer called the PC/RT, which was descended from a much neglected computer that IBM built in 1975 called the 801. SUN Microsystems developed the RISC I chip further and came up with the SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) which was very successful. Newer RISC chips include the PowerPC which is built by a several vendors and used in both newer IBM products and all new Macintoshes. Intel, struggling to maintain backward compatibility with its huge installed base of x86 chips, is now combining both CISC and RISC features in its 80786 and Pentium Pro.