Z:gnu-www-ja-google-engineering-talk--a83ddb-Now, UNIX consists of many com/en

Now, UNIX consists of many components that communicate through interfaces that are more or less documented. And the users use those interfaces. So to be compatible with UNIX required using the same interfaces, which meant that the initial design decisions were already made, except one: what range of target machines to support. UNIX had been designed to support 16-bit machines, which was a lot of extra work, because programs had to be kept small; so I decided to save that extra work by not supporting anything less than a 32-bit machine. I figured it would take many years to get the system done and by then people would normally be using 32-bit machines anyway, and that turned out to be true.