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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
byViol8 ( 599362 ) writes:
"We're dumping RT"
byjellomizer ( 103300 ) writes:
Like they dumped CE
As well NT for the PowerPC and NT for the Alpha.
In short Windows isn't successful unless it is compatible with the decades of legacy stuff.
The reason why we are not all on 64bit windows is because we still may have some 16bit windows 3.1 apps that we cannot replace.
When Microsoft dominated they pushed developers towards non-cross platform development... So now they are forced to deal with back-assward compatibility.
byc2me2 ( 2202232 ) writes:
You are completely full of shit. Somehow, Microsoft supporting multiple hardware platforms magically becomes Microsoft restricting hardware platforms! It's like you live in bizarro-land.
NT was built on MIPS, then later ported to x86 and other platforms. MIPS failed in the marketplace, so Microsoft *did what customers wanted* and stopped supporting MIPS.
Microsoft ported NT to Alpha, because that looked like the next big platform (in workstations and servers). Alpha was ridiculously expensive, both to buy
bymrchaotica ( 681592 ) * writes:
AMD64 would never have reached the market unless Microsoft had ported Windows to run on it.
I don't believe that. Since x86-64 is backwards-compatible to 32-bit OSs, It would have been just fine for AMD to release it running 32-bit Windows. It was still as faster processor, after all, whether it was running in 64-bit mode or not.
Then customer demand would have forced Microsoft to provide x86-64 support, Intel's wishes be damned.
In fact, the way I remember it, that's pretty much what happened. The first x86-6
byHowitzer86 ( 964585 ) writes:
I remember this too. Wasn't compatibility the main reason for sticking to 32 bit Windows XP on a 64 bit system? A big reason I remember is that if you didn't have more than 4 GB of ram you wouldn't see a benefit, and at the time, 2 GB was still huge. Actually, 2 GB was the limitation most 32 bit software had because you needed to flip the /3GB switch [microsoft.com] in boot.ini, and even then the software had to be compiled a certain way to be large address aware.
At the time, AMD was known for having the faster processor
bydrinkypoo ( 153816 ) writes:
I remember this too. Wasn't compatibility the main reason for sticking to 32 bit Windows XP on a 64 bit system?
Well, sort of. The main problem was that XP64 was a festering pile of ass. But yeah, compatibility was a big problem; you couldn't just use your XP32 drivers, and a lot of manufacturers didn't bother to release a 64-bit driver for their hardware.
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