
A History of Modern 64-bit Computing (2007) [pdf] - Aloha
http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/csep590/06au/projects/history-64-bit.pdf
======
chx
If you found this PDF interesting then also read this 2009 article from John
C. Dvorak
[http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp](http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp)

~~~
eru
The PDF was interesting, but the Dvorak article linked was meh.

------
fulafel
This mentions only in passing the 64-bit RISCs that preceded AMD64 & Itanium.
Also some outright fiction like "IA64 provided unmatched performance on scale-
up workloads". I guess the Microsoft authors don't want to talk about shipping
a 32-bit NT on those while the competition had all 64-bit sw stacks :)

Very interesting read still.

~~~
Aloha
I'd argue that there was no true demand for 64 bit computing prior to
2001-2002, if you look at say the Sun Ultra series of workstations, most
couldn't go beyond 4 gb of ram per processor, many much less, the same appears
to be the case for DEC. The exception largely was SGI.

Even then, the markets Microsoft was selling NT into, wouldn't have benefitted
much from the extra memory (or the greater floating point performance) allowed
by 64-Bit processors. Microsoft has never been in the scientific computing
part of the business that SUN, DEC, and SGI were playing in.

~~~
fulafel
Sure, workstations didn't need 64-bit at that time. But servers did, and at
that time Windows was still trying to prove its credibility as a server OS vs
the incumbent Sun/HP/IBM/etc platforms. Another field where 64-bit was an even
more urgent requirement was HPC. At the time HPC was more focused on big iron
than PC clusters.

Here's a classic post from John Mashey outlining the rationale for 64-bit in
the early 90s:
[http://yarchive.net/comp/64bit.html](http://yarchive.net/comp/64bit.html)

Also remember how long and painful the 16-to-32 transition was on Microsoft's
platforms. They had every reason to get their platform and running up many
years before customers needed the 64-bit apps.

~~~
Aloha
Yeah, that's more or less the argument I was making - (though I seem to recall
that it wasn't until the late 90's that the sun user land was 64bit, it was
all still 32bit) I don't consider Windows Server a really good general purpose
server system, its excellent at some workloads though.

IA-64 was a mistake, it has hurt everyone who touched it, I believe it killed
VMS (beyond the crazy way VMS is licensed) (and did no favors for HP-UX
either.) - it is and was too hard to build a really efficient compiler for -
thankfully microsofts porting effort to IA-64 got the codebase set up to go to
AMD64.

In many ways though, as much as I'd like to see other microarchitectures, x86
is the UNIX of hardware, it's good enough for most applications, and in the
long run, good always beats perfect.

