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That may have been Dave Cutler's doing. Cutler came from DEC and did the OS for the VAX. (Not UNIX, DEC's own OS). When DEC went from 16 to 32 bits, the VAX was
by Animats 2y ago
That may have been Dave Cutler's doing. Cutler came from DEC and did the OS for the VAX. (Not UNIX, DEC's own OS). When DEC went from 16 to 32 bits, the VAX was made hardware-capable of booting up in PDP-11 mode. Nobody used that feature, because the result was an overpriced PDP-11. So it seemed reasonable to think that, once the 386 was out, everybody would run 32-bit software on new hardware.
That did not happen. 16-bit applications hung on for a decade.