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That and if you asked 20 years ago what CPUs our desktops will be running, not only would Intel not necessarily have been a popular answer (Many compiler books were written around that time, giving us a guess as to what the academic groupthink was, and they generally treat x86 as a weird ISA soon-to-be obsolete or dead) but Intel's main architectural competitor (ARM) might not've even been mentioned at all.

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The answer would have likely been SuperH and Transmeta, both way dead.

Things change fast.

I would not have guessed SuperH, but I did not use Dreamcast or Jornada. 32-bit CPU with 16-bit instructions seems weird.

VLIW had a lot of hype. DSPs had already proven it, and Itanium, Transmeta, and various embedded processors were using it.

As a mostly Mac-user back then, I liked PowerPC, and POWER3 was leading the way to 64-bit, but I wasn’t expecting PCs to switch to PowerPC. The RISC systems had not all been executed in the face of the not-yet-released threat of Itanium. I was expecting the diversity to continue, for cross-architecture programming to be the rule and not the exception.

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