Firstly you need to know what an operating system is. Wikipedia describes an OS as “the software component of a computer system that is responsible for the management and coordination of activities and the sharing of the resources of the computer. The operating system acts as a host for application programs that are run on the machine. As a host, one of the purposes of an operating system is to handle the details of the operation of the hardware. This relieves application programs from having to manage these details and makes it easier to write applications.”

Never mind that, you probably know O/S’s as Windows 98, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Linux, UNIX. All differ from each other and have the various Pros and Cons.

What is a 64 bit O/S? Basically it’s a computer system that can access more that 4 Gigabytes of memory (RAM). As time progresses peoples requirements for memory are getting larger. I’m not entirely sure what we will do with all that memory but if you ask around people never thought they would have needed all the memory they currently use now.

Currently we are at the end of an era, a transition period for Operating Systems as we know it. The most recent time anything like this happened was 1987 for high end systems (about 1990 for regular systems) when people needed more than 1 megabyte (1/1000th of a Gigabyte) of memory for their computers and 16 bit DOS just was not cutting it.

Windows 3.0 was ready for 32 bits and everyone jumped at it. Windows 3.0 was terrible by anyone’s standard but people were in need of anything that could address more than one megabyte. Very soon we will see this transition period happen again, people will be in need of more RAM and an Operating System that supports it! There are 4 basic choices that people will get for an O/S: MS Vista, Linux, UNIXes and Apple. Who will support 64 bit better is anyone’s guess!

You maybe ask how do I know this? Well this writing is based on Moore’s Law which even after 30 years continues to be relative even today.

Moores Law is “the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years.”

Closely following behind Moore’s law is the demand for more memory. The demand doubles approximately every 18months! This is what has driven us to 64 bit computing. Whats even scarier is that it has taken us about 30-40 years to exhaust 32 bits. If we follow that trend one can imagine we will exhaust 64 bits in another 40-50 years, but I don’t dare to imagine what we are doing with 17.2 billion gigabytes, 16.8 million terabytes, or 16 exabytes of RAM.