{"id":109103,"date":"2023-12-05T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-12-05T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=109103"},"modified":"2023-12-05T10:00:44","modified_gmt":"2023-12-05T18:00:44","slug":"20231205-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20231205-00\/?p=109103","title":{"rendered":"What was the code name for 64-bit Windows?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The code name for the effort to port Windows from 32-bit to 64-bit was Sundown<\/i>. Although the intended target was Intel’s Itanium architecture, the initial effort was to port 32-bit Windows to the 64-bit Alpha AXP<\/a>. At the time, Itanium chips existed only in simulators. but Alpha AXP chips had been in production for years, and there was a glut of unused Alpha AXP systems among Microsoft Windows developers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The code name for the 64-bit Windows project was Sundown<\/i>.<\/p>\n

I hadn’t given the code name much thought. Lots of projects have code names, and you rarely think deeply about the name. It’s just an arbitrary collection of words to identify a project.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t until the ship party that I realized that the code name actually meant something. The project lead went on stage to thank everyone for their hard work and congratulate them on a job well done, and then finished the speech by announcing Sun? Down!<\/i><\/p>\n

It was then that I realized that the code name of “Sundown” was not chosen arbitrarily. It was a jab at Sun Microsystems, who had recently released Solaris 7, a 64-bit operating system built on the UltraSPARC processor. The 64-bit version of Windows was a direct attack against Sun’s early foothold, with the goal of unseating the current leader.<\/p>\n

Today, the leading 64-bit operating system is neither Solaris nor Windows. It’s Android: As of 2020, over 80% of adults in the world own a smartphone, over 70% of smartphones are running Android, and nearly 90% of Android devices use ARM64<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sundown, which was a hidden jab at the competition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-109103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Sundown, which was a hidden jab at the competition.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109103\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}