I completed my Master of Mathematics degree in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in 1989, under the supervision of Dr. Gaston Gonnet (now at ETH Zurich). The topic of software portability arose out of my work in 1987 porting the Maple computer algebra system from the 32- and 36-bit mainframes and minicomputers it had been developed on, to the then-new 16-bit IBM Personal Computer family.
Much has changed in the computer world since then. All personal computers now have at least a 32-bit bus width, with most new ones being 64-bits wide. The typical amount of memory available has increased two-thousand-fold from the typical megabyte found in an 80286-based PC of the late 80s. Applications that are now much larger and more complex than the mainframe applications of the late 20th century now comfortably fit on a PC.