It was the small number of addressing modes and commands that resulted in the term Reduced Instruction Set. This is not an accurate terminology, as RISC designs often have huge command sets of their own. The real difference is the philosophy of doing everything in registers and loading and saving the data to and from them. This is why the design is more properly referred to as load-store. Over time the older design technique became known as Complex Instruction Set Computer, or CISC, although this was largely to give them a different name for comparison purposes.