One day overnight in 2005:>can no longer use Windows 95>your PCI cards are garbage>your powerPC mac is garbage>can't run old video games>can't even read FAT16 without jumping through hoopsThis seems like a lot to sacrifice just to make int go bigger. Is there a real story behind this, like: they were trying to make these things obsolete on purpose? I'm thinking CIA backdoors and things like that
>>107121482so you can use more ram retard
>>107121482You're barking up the wrong tree if that's what you're searching for.
4GB RAM limit was quickly reaching the point where it would have been a problem. I remember running 32b Windows XP on a 4GB machine and only about 2GB were actually usable because the rest of the address space was used up by video card memory mapping or fuck knows what other special reserved shit, I don't remember exactly. Back then I also dual-booted Vista 64b which actually supported the 4GB properly.AMD64 CPUs were also simply faster than the old x86 CPUs, because they maintained compatibility but also made some important changes like adding more standard registers to the architecture.
>>107121482Turns out that we actually did need more than 4gb ram. Not much more actually, 8gb is still enough for most PCs unless they have 100+tabs open.
>>107121573you can get 64GB RAM in 32-bit Windows by enabling PAE though
>>107121482I actually think this is one of those forced-obsolescence events that *wasn't* purely for nefarious reasons (install backdoors, seize an open source project, damage a competitor)It is a fact that PC software (especially vidya) was running up against the hard limits of memory address space. But I think an even bigger factor was that the dot-com thing was happening for real this time: normgroids were descending like locusts on sites like MySpace and Facebook, and *their servers* needed these changes just to keep up
>>107121482None of those things are true though. 64-bit x86 had full backwards compatibility with 32-bit x86.
