Visual Studio have announced that their 2022 release will be 64-bit and that is great, though long-overdue news. However, it isn’t technically the first such 64-bit version. Twenty-one years ago I ran the Visual C++ Debugger team and we released a 64-bit version of Visual C++ for the Itanium, so that Visual C++ developers could debug their 64-bit apps. This was the same shell that would become VS2002, and contained the VS text editor and our 64-bit debugger, all compiled natively for IA64 (remember: this was before managed code even existed).
Read more: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/original-64-bit-visual-studio-old-enough-drink-now-andy-pennell/