Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Next up: Why, in the year 2014, am I still running installers that have 
> 16-bit dithered logos? WTF?

Obviously you need to be able to run it in safe mode...

Speaking of which, even though the 80386 processor was introduced
in 1985 (that's almost 30 years ago), PCs still boot up in 16-bit
mode. Yes, even the new 64-bit ones.

The very first thing that the OS does is to switch to either 32-bit
mode (if the CPU is that old) or to 64-bit mode. After that it will
usually never revert back to 16-bit mode ever again.

Support for 16-bitness increases the CPU complexity and thus its price,
and is overall just dead weight that has little to no purpose.

(Granted, there might still be *some* software out there that's 16-bit
and needs to be run even on a modern PC... although this will happen
*only* on Windows. I don't think Linux or BSD has ever run anything
in 16-bit mode for as long as they have existed.
And the thing is, if you have some obscure legacy driver or something
like that, and it's 16-bit, it's only impacting the computer's performance,
even if so slightly.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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