[WLUG] Re: WLUG Meeting Feb 11th 2021! Topic: Good question!

I don't want to join the endian wars. So I'll comment on something else. Stratus did not support Itanium because they follow rather than lead the market. When a replacement for PA-RISC was considered at Stratus we did look at Itanium. I recall studying the FW then called "EFI" around 2003 when I was in the VOS group. For the in-house VOS OS, Stratus would need compilers for PL/I and C and a modified linker to get to Itanium. Stratus never made this investment. What the VOS group did was to port to x86. Today VOS is still a 32-bit OS that runs on Motorola 68K, i860, PA-RISC and x86. This is unlikely to ever change for VOS as the compiler and linker tech leads have left Stratus. For the other three OS's supported by Stratus, Windows, Linux, VMware ESX, outsiders, not Stratus, would or would not be porting their OS to Itanium. (As was the case for amd64). Since the Stratus value add is to take applications coded to run on commodity HW and make the apps highly reliable by running on Stratus HW, Stratus would not move to Itanium until the customers already were developing to that platform. -- One more comment on a different topic: Me too, but somewhat bigger/faster MCUs. I still occasionally code in C, but it is more productive with high level interpreted languages on these chips. Lately I'm very excited about esp8266 and CircuitPython. FYI, A programmer's intro to esp8266: https://tttapa.github.io/ESP8266/Chap01%20-%20ESP8266.html -BE