The point is that they didn't know it's impossible. They had good reasons for believing otherwise (see my other comment in this thread) and it's the nature of technological progress that sometimes even experts have to take a chance on being wrong. Lessons learned. We can move on without having to slag others for trying.

So we would never build a computer because back in 1950 we didn't know how to make compilers, only raw bytes of machine code (we couldn't even "compile" assembly language). Life somethings require that you create a prototype of something that you think will work to see if it really does in the real world.

But with 1950s-era machines, it was expected that programmers were capable of manually scheduling instructions optimally, because compilers simply didn't exist back then.

VLIW architectures are often proposed to simplify the superscalar logic, but the problem with VLIW is that it forces a static schedule, which is incompatible with any code/architecture where the optimal schedule might be dynamic based on the actual data. In other words, any code that involves unpredictable branches, or memory accesses that may hit or miss the cache--in general CPU terms, that describes virtually all code. VLIW architectures have only persisted in DSPs, where the set of algorithms that are trying to be optimized is effectively a small, closed set.

> So we would never build a computer because back in 1950 we didn't know how to make compilers

No that's different - the big idea with the Itanium was specifically to shift the major scheduler work to the compiler. We didn't build the first computers with the idea we'd build compilers later.

But we did build an awful lot of RISC machines with exactly that idea. And it worked.