I&#x27;d argue that there was no true demand for 64 bit computing prior to 2001-2002, if you look at say the Sun Ultra series of workstations, most couldn&#x27;t go beyond 4 gb of ram per processor, many much less, the same appears to be the case for DEC. The exception largely was SGI.<p>Even then, the markets Microsoft was selling NT into, wouldn&#x27;t have benefitted much from the extra memory (or the greater floating point performance) allowed by 64-Bit processors. Microsoft has never been in the scientific computing part of the business that SUN, DEC, and SGI were playing in.