There are so many sins that have been committed in the name of progress.
Most of the early Windows games won’t even run anymore. There’s been more lost than we can reasonably understand.
My journey took me through to Windows 2000 pro (as opposed to server) for a while there. I eventually moved over to XP, then Vista, then 7.
I was one of the first people I knew of that ran Vista 64 bit. Most didn’t have the hardware for it, but the core 2 duo in my mobile computer was capable, so I jumped ship as soon as I could.
I’m both unsurprised and disappointed that itanium, Intel’s first attempt at 64 bit CPUs, failed. Starting new with an instruction set that was built from the ground up for modern applications was both very ambitious and presented a fairly unique opportunity for the industry, but they just couldn’t move enough units, and AMD saw the writing on the wall, and created the 64 bit extension for the x86 instruction set.
Oh well. Another opportunity lost.
We have another one with the whole ARM processor race that Apple kicked off with the M1.
I’m only sad that it went to arm and not RISC V.
That would have been quite the change.
Oh well. Maybe RISC V will see another opportunity soon, since NASA commissioned a new generation of radiation hardened processors for spaceflight computers, and they’re RISC V… Who knows.
Fortunately a lot of early Windows shit runs in Wine, since the most stable Linux API is Win32. Anything older than that either works in 86box or was broken to begin with. Okay, that’s not fair - WineVDM is necessary to bridge the gap for the dozen Windows 3.1 programs that matter. I am never allowed to write those off when one of them is Castle Of The Winds.
What Intel learned with Itanium is that compatibility is god. They thought their big thing was good chip design and modern foundries. They were stupid. AMD understood that what kept Intel relevant was last year’s software running better this year. This was evident back in the 486 days, when AMD was kicking their ass in terms of cycles per operation, and it caused division-by-zero errors with network benchmarks taking less than one millisecond.
But software has won.
The open architecture of RISC-V is feasible mostly because architecture doesn’t fucking matter. People are running Steam on their goddamn phones. It’s not because ARM is amazing; it’s because machine code is irrelevant. Intermediate formats can be forced upon even proprietary native programs. Macs get one last gasp of custom bullshit, with Metal just barely predating Vulkan, and if they try anything unique after that then it’s a deliberate waste of everyone’s time. We are entering an era where all software for major platforms should Just Work.
There are so many sins that have been committed in the name of progress.
Most of the early Windows games won’t even run anymore. There’s been more lost than we can reasonably understand.
My journey took me through to Windows 2000 pro (as opposed to server) for a while there. I eventually moved over to XP, then Vista, then 7.
I was one of the first people I knew of that ran Vista 64 bit. Most didn’t have the hardware for it, but the core 2 duo in my mobile computer was capable, so I jumped ship as soon as I could.
I’m both unsurprised and disappointed that itanium, Intel’s first attempt at 64 bit CPUs, failed. Starting new with an instruction set that was built from the ground up for modern applications was both very ambitious and presented a fairly unique opportunity for the industry, but they just couldn’t move enough units, and AMD saw the writing on the wall, and created the 64 bit extension for the x86 instruction set.
Oh well. Another opportunity lost.
We have another one with the whole ARM processor race that Apple kicked off with the M1. I’m only sad that it went to arm and not RISC V. That would have been quite the change.
Oh well. Maybe RISC V will see another opportunity soon, since NASA commissioned a new generation of radiation hardened processors for spaceflight computers, and they’re RISC V… Who knows.
I’m off on a tangent. Weeeee
Fortunately a lot of early Windows shit runs in Wine, since the most stable Linux API is Win32. Anything older than that either works in 86box or was broken to begin with. Okay, that’s not fair - WineVDM is necessary to bridge the gap for the dozen Windows 3.1 programs that matter. I am never allowed to write those off when one of them is Castle Of The Winds.
What Intel learned with Itanium is that compatibility is god. They thought their big thing was good chip design and modern foundries. They were stupid. AMD understood that what kept Intel relevant was last year’s software running better this year. This was evident back in the 486 days, when AMD was kicking their ass in terms of cycles per operation, and it caused division-by-zero errors with network benchmarks taking less than one millisecond.
But software has won.
The open architecture of RISC-V is feasible mostly because architecture doesn’t fucking matter. People are running Steam on their goddamn phones. It’s not because ARM is amazing; it’s because machine code is irrelevant. Intermediate formats can be forced upon even proprietary native programs. Macs get one last gasp of custom bullshit, with Metal just barely predating Vulkan, and if they try anything unique after that then it’s a deliberate waste of everyone’s time. We are entering an era where all software for major platforms should Just Work.