In the summary of their accomplishments, the earlier IBM 801 work by others is explicitly referenced. What is unique about the work of Hennessy and Patterson is their systematic method for evaluating instructions and their process for eliminating less used instructions to reduce the instruction set to a more efficient and smaller set. The headline is misleading. The award is made by the Association for Computing Machinery. Google supplies the funds but has no role in the selection process. I am a former President of ACM and a Turing Award winner and have chaired the Turing Award committee in the past. I am also a Google employee, and I am pleased that the ACM has chosen to recognize the pioneering work of these two computer scientists.
Vint Cerf
Biting the hand that feeds IT
