Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1363

Roger Schlafly

You miss the point. This isn't about 36-bit vs. the world, it's about the fact that the computer industry creates itself new every generation. At one point the industry had converged on 36-bit machines too, then the IBM 360 came along and changed the paradigm. It's only a matter of time until something else comes along, and people then will feel like their situation is unique and has never before been experienced. As long as people feel that way they will not look to the past to see if solutions to their problems exist, but will insist on re-inventing everything from scratch.

The mainframe industry had a pretty good handle on the problems of software maintenance, maintaining upward-compatibility, etc., then PC's came along and people felt there was nothing people needed to learn. As a result, mi$such has trouble maintaining applications compatibility between two *successive* versions of winblows. They're only just getting to the point where they maintain enough software inventory to make it easy to cleanly remove software, and still haven't provided a way to easily step back to a prior version if the new version doesn't work for you.