I wonder if the people at Intel who decided on the x86 instruction set had any idea how that would affect the future of computing. Such a small-seeming decision at the time turned out to have a huge impact. Kinda like how America chose English over German as our official language by just one vote. Think of the impact that would have had if one vote had been different.
It really is amazing how far the X86 language has been pushed, and it's still being pushed into the 64 bit world. If Intel had gotten behind a simpler architecture like Alpha or PA-RISC, they might finally have gotten us out of this mess. As it is, Itanium is so complex and arcane that very few people want to program for it; they would rather carry on with X86-64. Go figure. That's what happens when you just let everything be decided by who's the richest and most aggressive at marketing.
It really is amazing how far the X86 language has been pushed, and it's still being pushed into the 64 bit world. If Intel had gotten behind a simpler architecture like Alpha or PA-RISC, they might finally have gotten us out of this mess. As it is, Itanium is so complex and arcane that very few people want to program for it; they would rather carry on with X86-64. Go figure. That's what happens when you just let everything be decided by who's the richest and most aggressive at marketing.
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