We’ve had affordable, mainstream, consumer-class 64-bit CPUs since 2004.
I don’t think anyone in 2004 would have predicted that we’d just now be going through most of the 64-bit transition in our operating systems and mainstream applications.
Well, the 386 came out in 1985, and it was 1995 before we had a popular version of Windows that was mostly 32-bit, so we’ve managed to double “bits” in half the time it took in the previous mainstream transition (roughly). Of course, in 1993, we had DEC’s Alpha systems, along with Digital’s own UNIX, both of which were 64-bit, but that was hardly mainstream…
