The 64-bit version of Windows was a direct attack against Sun’s early foothold, with the goal of unseating the current leader. It was a jab at Sun Microsystems, who had recently released Solaris 7, a 64-bit operating system built on the UltraSPARC processor. It was then that I realized that the code name of “Sundown” was not chosen arbitrarily. The project lead went on stage to thank everyone for their hard work and congratulate them on a job well done, and then finished the speech by announcing Sun? Down! It wasn’t until the ship party that I realized that the code name actually meant something. It’s just an arbitrary collection of words to identify a project.
Lots of projects have code names, and you rarely think deeply about the name. I hadn’t given the code name much thought. The code name for the 64-bit Windows project was Sundown. but Alpha AXP chips had been in production for years, and there was a glut of unused Alpha AXP systems among Microsoft Windows developers. At the time, Itanium chips existed only in simulators. Although the intended target was Intel’s Itanium architecture, the initial effort was to port 32-bit Windows to the 64-bit Alpha AXP. The code name for the effort to port Windows from 32-bit to 64-bit was Sundown.
