Older Hardware can't do what? . . .
Older hardware can deal just fine with more than 32 bits. Older SOFTWARE maybe not so much. A 256K floppy disk has a million or so bits... You can run ZFS on 32-bit hardware just fine. 'bc' is an arbitrary precision calculator, ran just fine on 16-bt Xenix 86, I think max precision was 128 or 256 DECIMAL places ,lots and lots of bits.
The lowly intel 8080 with an 8-bit accumulator could even manage large bunches of bits... Albeit only 8 at the time. There were some 128 bit binary floating point libraries for it even.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
