Am 22.01.2014 17:54, schrieb Warp:
> 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.

Not all of them. Look up UEFI and coreboot.


> 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.

I thought the 64-bit mode was exactly the same as the 32-bit one, except 
that some memory pages are flagged differently?


> 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.

Even then, it might be argued that a bytecode interpreter on a modern 
machine could probably run 16-bit code just as fast as machines from 
back then.

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