I'm reading Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine where a team at Data General design a new machine (codenamed Eagle, later named MV/8000). It is 32-bit extension of a previous architecture (the 16-bit Eclipse). One of the revolving themes seems to be, that they don't want to create a machine with a mode bit and that they succeeded in this.However, it leaves out how this is technically achieved, and it also doesn't go into why it was so attractive to create a machine without a mode bit. The book is not a technical book so it could be that the details were somehow distorted. However, you get the feeling reading that book that a mode bit solution was common (and hence feasible) at the time, but was deemed unattractive by the engineers maybe for aesthetic reasons. The book also makes it seem like an immensely difficult task to create a design without a mode bit, which was somehow overcome by this particular team.I found this description of how it was achieved:http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/330/kidder/no_mode_bit.txtIt seems to basically be about using a previously unused portion of the opcode space for the new instructions. I must admit I was a bit disappointed that it was just that. Also I think this still leaves some questions unanswered: Firstly, how did the 16-bit processes live in the 32-bit address space? Because I think that is the key challenge in making a 32-bit extension without a mode bit. Extending the instruction set, on the other hand, is a relatively common undertaking. Since there's no description of how it happened one could assume that the 16-bit code simply access memory as it always did, maybe it sees some type of virtualized/banked view of memory (with new CPU registers controlling where the first address is) or something like that. But I don't know if there's more to it than that. In that case one could argue it sort-of was a mode bit solution. The 16-bit mode processes could run alongside the other processes by virtue of special features added to the CPU. Whether this might imply a new bit in a control register or just some new added control register is unclear.Secondly, why was it so appealing to create a machine without a mode bit? Many  of the benefits touted in the book is that customers wanted to run old software. But this doesn't seem to speak against a mode bit, since the whole purpose of using a mode bit is to have backwards compatibility. When AMD extended x86 to 64-bits, at least according to my understanding of the word mode bit what they did was exactly to add a mode bit. A special bit that would make the CPU in 64-bit mode. And another bit that would make a process execute in a sub-mode of the 64-bit mode (to enable compatibility with 32-bit applications). The essence of the submode is that the CPU interprets the instruction stream as the old 32-bit instructions but that the 32-bit memory accesses made are resolved using the new page tables format (setup by the 64-bit aware operating system) and eventually mapped to the full physical address space. Also, the 32-bit code can be preempted by 64-bit code. Like the Data General solution this also allowed a 32-bit program to run along under 64-bit programs (16-bit vs 32-bit in the DG case). So from a customer point-of-view there appears to be no difference at all. Hence the only benefit could have been in the implementation, simplifying the design, but the book doesn't make it sound like that is the concern, since the mode bit seeemed to be common even at that time (and it seems later architectures have also employed it as the x64 case shows).I'm sure there's something I missed, so it would be great if someone could discuss more on the technical details and virtues of this no mode-bit design.
Data General MV/8000 virtues of No mode bit
computer architecture
The answer is that Ed deCastro, President of Data General Management, had established a team of engineers in North Carolina specifically to design the next generation CPU. He assigned the task of support and incremental enhancements to us, the Massachusetts team. Three times we proposed a major new architecture, each time with a very sensible mode bit, and described it as a modest incremental enhancement. Each time, Ed saw through our disguise and rejected the proposal, expecting the North Carolina team to succeed. Ed believed that regardless of how we attempted to disguise our proposals, he would know it was a new generation architecture if it had a mode bit. So we had to propose a new generation architecture with no mode bit, even if that made it less efficient. That's how we got it past Ed deCastro. See The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder. 