After reading this thread:

http://www.antionline.com/showthread...hreadid=242182

and having a lengthy discussion with my dad I have come to the conclusion that although OS's appear to be moving forward, they aren't really. They may be able to handle larger workloads now and may be faster, but i can't help but feel that a lot of this "improvement" is due to hardware, and the current OS's are just taking advantage of developments.

So it really is time for 64-bit OS's to be developed, and it appears that this is now happening if these two pages are anything to go by:

www.ibm.com/servers/aix/news/64bit.html

www.sun.com/solaris/

The questionsthat i have is, are these true 64-bit OS's, or are they still based on parts of 32-bit OS's. If they are true then what kind of advantages do they offer. How noticable is the improvements if there are any. Finally when is it likely that we will see 64-bit OS's for our personal computers and where do people think these OS's will come from, ie open source, or dare i say it,Microsoft