The AT&T Hobbit is a microprocessor design that AT&T Corporation developed in the early 1990s. It was based on the company's CRISP (C-language Reduced Instruction Set Processor) design, which in turn grew out of the C Machine design by Bell Labs of the late 1980s. All were optimized for running code compiled from the C programming language. The design concentrates on fast instruction decoding, indexed array access, and procedure calls. Its processor is partially RISC-like. The project ended in 1994 because the Hobbit failed to achieve commercially viable sales. History CRISP was produced in 1987, largely for experimental purposes. Apple Computer approached AT&T and paid it to develop a newer version of the CRISP suitable for low-power use in the Newton handheld computer. The result is the Hobbit, which was initially produced as the 92010 in 1992 with a 3 KB instruction buffer and the 92020 in 1994 with 6 KB. Several support chips were produced: AT&T 92011 System Management Unit AT&T 92012 PCMCIA Controller AT&T 92013 Peripheral Controller AT&T 92014 Display Controller However, the Hobbit-based Newton was never produced. According to Larry Tesler, "The Hobbit was rife with bugs, ill-suited for our purposes, and overpriced. We balked after AT&T demanded not one but several million more dollars in development fees." Apple dropped interest in the Hobbit and moved on to help form Advanced RISC Machines, ARM, in late 1990 with a $2.5 million investment. Apple sold its stake in ARM years later for a net $800 million. The Active Book Company (founded by Hermann Hauser, who also founded Acorn Computers), which had been using an ARM in its Active Book personal digital assistant (PDA), was later purchased by AT&T and was subsumed by AT&T's EO Personal Communicator company, which produced an early PDA running PenPoint OS from the GO Corporation. Hobbit was used in the earliest prototypes of the BeBox until in 1993, AT&T announced discontinuation of Hobbit. With these exceptions there was almost no commercial use of the design, and production was ended in 1994. Design In a traditional RISC design, better referred to as load-store architecture, memory is accessed explicitly through commands that load data into registers and back out to memory. Instructions that manipulate those data generally work solely on the registers. This allows the processor to clearly separate the movement of data from the processing done on it, making it easier to tune the instruction