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That’s true, but most Microsoft software was never ported to Alpha. Or Itanium.

So, you could get a 64-bit computer running Windows, but you wouldn’t be able to play Pinball, or read your emails, or run some other software you needed to work.

Oddly enough, the situation was much better with 64-bit Unix, where your usual tools worked flawlessly.



One of the unsung advantages of having the source available; you just need a compiler and some libraries and suddenly you have a ton of software even in an entirely new architecture.


Not all SW was easily to port from 32 to 64 bits. There are still open source programs which will not compile and run on 64 bits architectures.


This is one interesting reason why porting to different platforms (word size, pointer size, endianness) helps find bugs.

Also, that’s why we all should write unit tests.




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