Comment Re:I hope not (Score 1) 489
Pre-PC days, you had to develop for a specific target OS/machine combo, and if you wanted to port across it was nearly impossible (even dealing with things like little/big endian systems).
Uh, wut?
Back in the EVIL PRE-PC DAYS--or, at least, the EVIL PRE-WINDOWS DOMINANCE DAYS--we cross-compiled our code onto at least half a dozen Unix variants, and Macs, with a mix of big- and little-endian, and 32-bit and 64-bit.
Only dumb companies built in dependencies on endianness or word size that made their code not work. Almost all the OS inconsistencies for us were hidden in a low-level OS-specific wrapper, except for the places where we had to use hand-coded assembler.