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The Long Road to 64 Bits: Double, double, toil and trouble

Published: 01 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Shakespeare’s words often cover circumstances beyond his wildest dreams. Toil and trouble accompany major computing transitions, even when people plan ahead. To calibrate “tomorrow’s legacy today,” we should study “tomorrow’s legacy yesterday.” Much of tomorrow’s software will still be driven by decades-old decisions. Past decisions have unanticipated side effects that last decades and can be difficult to undo.

References

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Mashey, J. 2004-05. Languages, levels, libraries, longevity. ACM Queue 2 (9): 32-38.
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Mashey, J. 1991. 64-bit computing. BYTE (September): 135-142. The complete text can be found by searching Google Groups comp.arch: Mashey BYTE 1991.
[3]
Bell, C. G., Mudge, J. C. 1978. The evolution of the PDP-11. In Computer Engineering: A DEC View of Computer System Design, ed. C. Gordon Bell, J. Craig Mudge, and John E. McNamara. Bedford, MA: Digital Press.
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Strecker, W. D. 1978. VAX-11/780: A virtual address extension to the DEC PDP-11 family. In Computer Engineering: A DEC View of Computer System Design, ed. C. Gordon Bell, J. Craig Mudge, and John E. McNamara. Bedford, MA: Digital Press.
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See reference 2.
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Rationale for International Standard---Programming Languages---C; http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n897.pdf (or other sites).
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Aspen Data Model Committee. 1997-1998. 64-bit programming models: Why LP64? http://www.unix.org/version2/whatsnew/lp64_wp.html.
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Josey, A. 1997. Data size neutrality and 64-bit support; http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/standards/10.data.html.
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Adding support for arbitrary file sizes to the single Unix specification; http://www.unix.org/version2/whatsnew/lfs20mar.html.

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  • (2021)Interactions, Impacts, and Coincidences of the First Golden Age of Computer ArchitectureIEEE Micro10.1109/MM.2021.311287641:6(131-139)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2021
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  1. The Long Road to 64 Bits: Double, double, toil and trouble

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      cover image Queue
      Queue  Volume 4, Issue 8
      System Evolution
      October 2006
      46 pages
      ISSN:1542-7730
      EISSN:1542-7749
      DOI:10.1145/1165754
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 01 October 2006
      Published in QUEUE Volume 4, Issue 8

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      View all
      • (2024)Neurodegenerative Diseases: from the First CNS Drugs to New Treatments in Discovery (A Review)Russian Journal of Bioorganic Chemistry10.1134/S106816202402017150:2(273-281)Online publication date: 9-Apr-2024
      • (2023)Video game performance analysis on selected operating systemsJournal of Computer Sciences Institute10.35784/jcsi.377229(317-324)Online publication date: 29-Dec-2023
      • (2021)Interactions, Impacts, and Coincidences of the First Golden Age of Computer ArchitectureIEEE Micro10.1109/MM.2021.311287641:6(131-139)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2021
      • (2016)Twice the Bits, Twice the TroubleProceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/2976749.2978403(541-552)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2016

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