X-Authentication-Warning: delorie.com: mail set sender to djgpp-bounces using -f From: Georg Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: Re: incompatible Date: Fri, 18 May 2012 11:40:00 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Lines: 24 Message-ID: References: <30744 DOT 3f7d7aa9 DOT 3ce7ea03 AT aol DOT com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 46.78.35.225 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 X-Trace: posting.google.com 1337366400 16388 127.0.0.1 (18 May 2012 18:40:00 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse AT google DOT com NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 18 May 2012 18:40:00 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse AT google DOT com Injection-Info: ec4g2000vbb.googlegroups.com; posting-host=46.78.35.225; posting-account=v5xbdQoAAAAOGc9Ccc-kLZyobvPlN3Qr User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.1.4) Gecko/20091016 Firefox/3.5.4,gzip(gfe) Bytes: 2096 To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by delorie.com id q4IJ01L0021745 Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com On May 18, 8:08 pm, Ster DOT DOT DOT AT aol DOT com wrote: > is 64 bit the end or do you think we will get 256 ? > > and maybe completely different incompatible processors  !? I think there are already processors available which use more than 64bit - but not from Intel I guess. One of the reasons for 64bit is that you can address more than 4GB of memory. The previous processors like 386 provided a VM86 mode to support the use of several 16bit applications while in 32bit mode. This is what the Windows XP command window is based on and makes it work so well. The 64bit processor comes without VM386 mode. So when Windows switches to 64bit mode it has no way to run a command window in VM386 or VM86 mode. This has to be emulated in software completely and that is provided by e.g. VirtualPC. A 64bit processor will usually boot in 16bit mode. So if you boot from a CD with DOS and have a FAT32 partition on your hard disk you can work in real mode DOS. Georg