Topic summary
16-bit application
Extracted from the Wikipedia article 16-bit computing.
16-bit application
In the context of IBM PC compatible and Wintel platforms, a 16-bit application is any software written for MS-DOS, OS/2 1.x or early versions of Microsoft Windows which originally ran on the 16-bit Intel 8088 and Intel 80286microprocessors. Such applications used a 20-bit or 24-bit segment or selector-offset address representation to extend the range of addressable memory locations beyond what was possible using only 16-bit addresses. Programs containing more than 2 bytes (65,536 bytes) of instructions and data therefore required special instructions to switch between their 64-kibibyte segments, increasing the complexity of programming 16-bit applications.