Damn kids. I was an early adopter of 32 bit coding. When I was in a big hurry to get my career started there was still plenty of 16 big code around, even Netscape ran on the 16 bit version of the Windows API. I ended up tapping the brakes and changing gears to make sure I didn’t have to deal with that bullshit. Most of my CS classes had been taught on 32 bit Unix boxes so it just felt like sticks and rocks.

The jump from 32 bit to 64 was not so dramatic. I Wonder if I’ll be around for 128 bit. I suspect the big disruption there will be changing the CPU cache line size, which has been stuck at 64 bytes for ages. I can’t imagine 4 words per cache line will be efficient.