[Info-vax] New CEO of VMS Software

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On Sun, 7 Jan 2024 00:27:15 -0000 (UTC), Dan Cross wrote:

> It took literally decades from the introduction of 64-bit Unix machines
> until most software was 64-bit clean.

I was doing Unix sysadmin work on DEC Alphas in the late 1990s until the 
early 2000s, when the client saw the writing on the wall and moved to 
Linux (and so did I).

They frequently asked me to download, build and install various items of 
open-source software. I don’t recall ever having a problem with 64-bitness 
per se.

> I was there; it was a painful
> time, and Linux was actually behind the curve here compared to many of
> the commercial vendors.

Jon “maddog” Hall shipped an Alpha to Linus Torvalds somewhere around 
1995, and Linux was running native 64-bit on DEC Alpha in releasable form 
by about 1996. That was only only the second hardware platform that Linux 
had been implemented on, at that stage. So it went portable at the same 
time it went 64-bit.

> The mere existence of those types a) didn't help the piles of code that
> was sloppy and made assumptions about primitive types ...

Piles of proprietary code, certainly.