[Info-vax] OpenVMS I64 V8.1 "Evaluation Release"?

[Michael Kraemer]

Dennis Grevenstein schrieb:

> As you yourself like to say, it can be important to be
> compatible across the whole line from a workstation
> to the bigger servers. If you just count workstations,
> what about the Sun Ultra 80 (4GB), SGI Octane (8GB)
> and several HP Cxxx or Cxxxx workstations with at least
> a PA8000 CPU?

I'm not only counting workstations,
but those oodles of RAM, which make 64bit worthwhile,
appeared in expensive servers first and then trickled
down the product lines. When this trend reached workstations
and entry servers, one could call 64bit "mainstream",
at the earliest. This wasn't before beginning 200x,
give or take a year. Before that, 64bit was a rather moot point,
although CPUs offered 64bit addressing almost a decade before,
that was my point.

To give a more practical example,
about two years ago I "inherited" a half dozen Alpha's
(workstations/entry servers), of mid-1990s vintage.
They had around 160MB RAM
(upgrade from an original 64MB or so, I guess),
a 1GB disk (the original one, now used as swap) and 4GB disk upgrade
(now used as system disk). That's what was available
and what mere mortals could afford at that time.
So one couldn't care less whether the CPU
addresses 64bits or just 32bit, it just doesn't make a difference.
Nevertheless the machines did useful work, I guess.

> One could have chosen one of the mature RISC platforms over
> x86_64, but for some reason it was adopted really fast.

You can run old x86 stuff, have 64bit in addition,
and it came just when the time was right,
i.e. problem sizes started to demand >4GB and
such amounts of RAM became affordable.

> If anything, we can state that Intel couldn't get the Itanium out
> fast enough. All the other 32bit -> 64bit updates took many
> years before 64bit software was ready.

 From the practical point of view,
there's little incentive for 64bit software to become ready
if you can't stuff enough RAM into your boxes.
Do a calloc( 4GB ) on a 1GB machine and watch the poor box
grind to a halt.
OTOH, it's not too difficult to ready a software for 64bits,
provided one didn't mess int's/long's etc (like I did unfortunately :-(
Run the compiler in 64bit mode and it'll tell you most of
the critical constructs.

> MIPS R4000 1991 - IRIX 6.2 1996
> PA8000 1996 - HP-UX 11.00 1997
> UltraSPARC I 1996 - Solaris 7 1998
> Alpha 1992 - OpenVMS 7.1 1997
> 
> When Intel introduced the 80386, people were happy with 4MB
> of RAM, 

That was around 1987, and I doubt many PCs had that much RAM.
Most were happy with 640kB, as they were told by their master.