Why are still not at 64 bits and a bit of Linux History

[Jon 'maddog' Hall]

On Thu, 2007-02-15 at 17:25 -0500, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Feb 2007 16:56:15 -0500
> "Jon 'maddog' Hall" <maddog at li.org> wrote:
> 
> > I actually thought that VMS was 64-bit right from the get-go on Alpha
> > (1993), but I could be wrong on that....
> No. It was 32-bits on the Alpha and still is. I followed up on that
> last year at the IDF in Houston. It was one of the things I
> specifically asked one of the VMS developers.

Hmmm, you seem to have someone else disagree with you, since earlier
they stated that "OpenVMS" was 64-bit in 1995, but I did not pay that
much attention to the "VMS stuff". :-)

Of course having VMS only 32-bit on the VAX made sense, as you could not
get the architecture to be 64-bit.

If Alpha VMS was only 32-bit, I would think that would have been another
classic mistake by Digital.  If there was one OS that could have taken
advantage of 64-bits, it was VMS.

(sigh)

md