Retrospective: very long instruction word archtectures and the ELI-512

In this paper I introduced the term VLIW. VLIW was motivated by a compiler technique, and, for many readers, this paper was their introduction to "region scheduling" as well. I had put forward the first region scheduling algorithm, called trace scheduling, a few years before. Since region scheduling is a compiler technique, it is of interest to fewer people, but it enables superscalars and VLIWs with lots of instruction-level parallelism (ILP). Because I could see the power of region scheduling, I first began to think about VLIWs. I was fortunate in that this allowed me to coin the term instruction-level parallelism, and to work out a lot of the original details and terminology of ILP, before many others believed it was important.