Hehe. OK. Hey I am not that old, though. I started with the sinclair ZX spectrum (8-bit CPU) when I was 12 years old.... 10 years...could become short, but not impossible. I am curious if Intel will get enough time to let die their 32-bit arch or if ARM destroys them before and they finally share the same destiny as 68x00 We'll see...
For the sake of the topic, I was only addressing the OS. I fully expect 32-bit apps to hang on for a decade or more, much in the same way 16-bit apps held on for seemingly forever after originally everyone was making the switch (originally) to 32-bit. But I digress, the original post was only focusing around the OS.
I digressed as well. But I think to make an opinion it's appropriate to talk about the past. We had DOS, win 1 to 3, win95 (4.0), win98 (4.1) and win98 SE, winME (4.9). Parallel to it win NT. The unification was then with w2000. Then came winXP. With Win xp was the first 64 bit version available. The NT branch was 32-bit related the other one still based on DOS. Native 16 bit support actually vanished with the introduction of 64bit arch at CPUs... I guess there won't be soon 128 bit which could replace. So I think 32-bit apps will run a long time even if there will be 'only' the 64-bit versions available...
Imagine the home computing power behind a 128-bit system. In the government and higher-end corporate world, I'm sure there are such systems, but today I cannot fully imagine a home system needing such a thing for a very long time. But I could be wrong. I remember when everyone thought 8-bit was more than enough and 16-bit was thought an insane luxury, while 32-bit was only a fantasy. That's the beauty of technology, you never truly know what tomorrow may bring and it can leap with a moments notice sometimes.
Windows 32 bit will not go away too soon. Still using Win 7 Ult x86 on old hardware and happy with it. Have an XP laptop which is 32 bit also
It's mostly the memory limits that became an issue. 16 bit = 64kb 32 bit = 4GB 64 bit = 16 exabytes! Which is 16,777,216tb of memory. So yeah, 128 bit systems are a long way off.
'More bits' or a 'x-bit system' has actually two meanings. More width or a bigger address space. (Does it operate on x-bit data or operate on x-bit integers or addresses...) We already have much higher bit width when it comes to interfaces such as memory controllers. (GPU cards) Or the Xeon Phi has 512-bit vector registers.... Actually the reason to go for more bits (in history) is to have more width, means more bandwidth. To extend the addressable space to 64-bit became interesting when 4GiB of physical memory was affordable, that's right.
If it ain't broke Microsoft doesn't remove it. You can trust them on keeping compatibility. Unlike Apple.
Lucky for us though, they usually fix it just in time for the next release which breaks everything all over again.
Oracle also stopped providing Windows 32-bit binaries with the latest version (10) of their Java platform (JRE and JDK). 32bit users have access to older versions only (which are still supported of course).
I will be no longer providing 32-bit update lists for the next version of Windows 10 v1809 on Windows Updates Downloader (WUD), though I will continue to provide 32-bit UL's on Windows 7 SP1 until EOS.
The thing is that even some Microsoft own apps are 32 bit like OneDrive sync. So firstly they need to migrate all their apps to 64-bit and then they can remove the support. At least we get some storage back like 3 GB because of the WoW64 layer
It really is the check and the egg (which comes first?). They (Microsoft) will not drop support for their 32-bit apps until they drop support for their 32-bit OS, but they'll not likely drop support for the 32-bit OS until more developments push for 64-bit apps, and finally, most developments will not do that until Microsoft drops support for 32-bit OS. - It really is a vicious cycle. lol I do believe we need this to come from the OS side of things first, the same way 16-bit was phased out when 32-bit OS became the norm. I believe the majority of hardware has 4+ GB of RAM and has had so for 10 years. Where you see systems (widespread) still running under 4 GB is likely underdeveloped countries (in my opinion).