RE: 64-bit

Good one, Vern!  I emailed Larry as well, and responded to a few posts in
the discussion area.

Good catch, Chuck.  Hope we can get a bunch of us to respond!

Dan Bale
SAMSA, Inc.
989-790-0507
DBale@SAMSA.com <mailto:DBale@SAMSA.com>
  Quiquid latine dictum sit altum viditur.
  (Whatever is said in Latin seems profound.)


-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-admin@midrange.com
[mailto:midrange-l-admin@midrange.com]On Behalf Of Vernon Hamberg
Sent: Tuesday, March 19, 2002 4:46 PM
To: larry@larryseltzer.com
Subject: 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

Would you like to see a challenging little arithmetic puzzle
that might get you or your kids or grandkids more interested
in math? Go to <http://cgi.wff-n-proof.com/MSQ-Ind/I-1E.htm>

Sillygism--

Something is better than nothing.
Nothing is better than a ham sandwich.
Ergo
Something is better than a ham sandwich.

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