64-bit

Read your article, "Whatever happened to 64-bit computing?", with interest.
Some comments:

1. IBM's AS/400 has had fully 64-bit systems for 5-6 years now. And
something like the 'revolutionary' programming techniques, like

>The trick to making 64-bits desirable is to design new types of
>applications that make use of them. Consider that obscenely large address
>space I described earlier: What if we were to design memory-mapped file
>systems? Imagine that you didn't have to open and close files, but that
>you manipulated them through data structures directly, and that it was the
>operating system's job to page the data into and out of memory as-needed.
>64-bit addresses are still large enough to handle any file system. It
>makes a lot of programming a lot easier.

has been used on this 'dinosaur' machine since its inception 20 years ago.
It's called single-level-store, i.e., all memory and disk are one address
space. No need to program segments, they don't exist at the abstract layer
exposed to developers.

2.
>people are going to be most concerned initially with running their
>existing code on them, and on porting it to the new architectures

Code written on the System/38 20 years ago will run, without change (on the
part of developers - there's an automatic conversion at the lowest level),
on any AS/400 (iSeries) today. No porting needed. Nada. Zilch.

Thanks

Vern Hamberg

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