I was recently reading Tracy Kidder’s excellent book Soul of a New Machine.

The author pointed out what a big deal the transition to 32-Bit computing was.

However, in the last 20 years, I don’t really remember a big fuss being made of most computers going to 64-bit as a de facto standard. Why is this?

  • Lardzor@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Originally, A 64bit OS was popular in the enterprise space. Businesses were running Windows NT using 64bit. I think the first version of Windows meant for consumers that got the 64bit upgrade was a version of Windows XP Pro X64, but it was uncommon. 64bit didn’t go mainstream until Windows 7. Before that, most PC hardware upgrades didn’t have 64 bit device drivers available. Even now, 64bit isn’t a requirement most of the time. You can get 64bit versions of a lot of applications, but a lot of applications still come as 32bit only.

    • Nicholas-Steel@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Windows XP 64bit was a… oddball operating system, it wasn’t just Windows XP but 64bit, there were notable technical differences between 32bit and 64bit Windows XP that can hinder software compatibility (Plus driver support wasn’t that particularly good for the 64bit version either).

      Windows Vista was when the 64bit version was essentially the 32bit version but 64bit. ie: they’re no longer significantly different.

      • lordofthedrones@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        XP 64 was a Server 2003 64bit edition for workstations. They had the same kernel as well. Oddball, but it did work well if you could find your drivers. I went straight to 7 64 after that.

        • Nicholas-Steel@alien.topBEnglish
          1·
          10 months ago

          Right,

          • Windows XP Professional 64bit is Windows 2003 kernel & something like the XP UI. This is why you can run in to software compatibility issues.
          • Windows XP 64bit (non-professional) was only ever available for Intel Itanium and Itanium 2 CPU’s.