[Oberon] Who knows hardware?

[eas lab]

Since we/NW initiated the FPGA project, some readers must know
hardware: to the extent of the Intel x32/x64 compatibility for
software.

As I remember, the transition from 16 to 32 bit consisted of:
 doubling the adr-bus width;
 the pairing of certain registers/accumulators to make 32-bit
    wide data-transfers.

Later, the complexity/mess of adding <sector registers> made
paging possible. This was not used by Motorola's 68X series which
was the alternative to Intel, and had a nice regular structure.

AFAIK, for backwards compatibility [which has been the basis of
WinTel's market dominance] the eg. single-byte operations, still
existed, with the same 'code' as the 16 bit CPUs in the 32 bit CPUs.

Do the original 16-bit instructions still exist in the 64bit CPUs?

How is it that W32lynx runs in this Win8.1 x64, but all other
32bit *.exe that I try, fail?

We know that the old PCs had a security problem, in that at
start-up, the BIOS could be set to boot from an intruder's own
USB device, thereby giving him access to the *owner's* internal
disk/s.  Documentation claims that that vunerability has now been
removed. But it seems to have just been replaced by time wasting
complexity, because we can still change the "boot device priority
order".

Perhaps I can search our mail-list archive, for that Russian ETHO
which may run on Win8.1 x64, since ftp & http to ethz sites, shows
only the GOOD old stuff?

I desperately need an ETHO-like system, that allows multiple text
windows accessibility, and mouse driven, to 'fit' this cursed laptop
which the vendor has already cycled through Win8.1 32-bit, Win10,
Win8.1 64bit, in order to match the ISP's hardware.

== Chris Glur.

PS. who remembers, was it in the 70's, that it was published that
Intel was to release a CPU that was to be directly programmed in
High Level Language? In those "fifth generation" days when AI was
booming, and the Japanese auto industry was swallowing the
"infinite frontier mentality" US auto industry, Intel's new Uproc
was later exposed to have several undocumented instructions.
The explanation was that the design was flawed, and that the
description and user manual, was written to fit how the
manufactured devices popped-out, rather than how they had been
intended to be, by design.

Marketing Trumps technology!