yep, and was hoping the youtube would be a rock video...Question Stanford's position on this --DEC had a big office in Palo Alto, but it is where we kept the fe

yep, and was hoping the youtube would be a rock video...Question Stanford's position on this --DEC had a big office in Palo Alto, but it is where we kept the feral Unix (er Ultrix) monsters...and DEC won the 32-bit war baby (at least until the micro prism chip architecture was misappropriated into the 8080, er. Pentium "Pro"). TL;DR: DataGeneral (a spin off of DEC from before my time) with the Eclipse team was battling DEC (a 1950s tech giant that made its name subverting IBM) with the VAX team for "first 32-bit" bragging rights. (To make things interesting, for me at least, my Dad was an expert at Data General technology and I was a teenage mutant DEC nerd.) When I learned VAX MACRO32 they were drawing comparisons between it and the (even then, older than dirt) IBM 360 assembler and it was totally mind blowing. Getting rid of of the memory limit on the (preceding) PDP11's separate code and data segments and introducing a 4.3GB virtual address space (the "Virtual Address eXtension") changed everything. Prior to that, computer scientists had to rely on complex "overlay" techniques to swap program and data segments in and out of memory at the application level (under RT11 and RSX11, the preceding operating systems to DEC 32-bit VAX/VMS and under RDOS, the preceding operating system to DG 32-bit A/OS). Too hard for non-specialists, so someone wrote an entire operating system (RSTS/E) in BASIC which was quickly starting to dominate in the run up to VMS (also probably inspired Bill Gates and his BASIC interpreter ROMs for competing microprocessors). iPhones/Macs and even Raspberry Pi are all dumping 32-bit now, but cost-effective 32-bit lives on in nRF and ESP class micro controllers that will surely "eat the planet" (who needs to carry a phone, dawn AR glasses/earplugs or sit at a desk/tablet when all planar surfaces for as far as you can see are I/O devices run by $0.10 micro controllers that network to edge nodes for any memory/compute heavy lifting).