commissioned_by berkeley risc
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ( ___MASK29___ ) is an agency of the U . S . Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military . ___MASK29___ ' s VLSI Project provided research funding to a wide variety of university - based teams in an effort to improve the state of the art in microprocessor design , then known as VLSI . Although little known in comparison to their work on what became the internet , the VLSI Project is likely one of the most influential research projects in modern computer history . Its offspring include BSD Unix , the RISC processor concept , many CAD tools still in use today , 32 - bit graphics workstations , fabless design houses and its own fab , MOSIS . A similar ___MASK29___ project partnering with industry , VHSIC , is generally considered to have had little or no impact . Berkeley RISC was one of two seminal research projects into RISC - based microprocessor design taking place under ARPA ' s VLSI project . RISC was led by David Patterson ( who coined the term RISC ) at the University of California , Berkeley between 1980 and 1984 . The other project took place only a short drive away at Stanford University under their MIPS effort starting in 1981 and running until 1984 . Berkeley ' s project was so successful that it became the name for all similar designs to follow ; even the MIPS would become known as a `` RISC processor '' . The Berkeley RISC design was later commercialized as the SPARC processor , and inspired the landmark DEC Alpha architecture as well as the ARM architecture which by 2014 powers most mobile phones . Unix ( trademarked as UNIX ) is a family of multitasking , multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original ___MASK61___ Unix , developed starting in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson , Dennis Ritchie , and others .