16-bit application



         


A 16 bit application is any software written for MS-DOS or early versions of Microsoft Windows which originally ran on the 16-bit Intel 8088 and Intel 80286 microprocessors. Such applications used a 20-bit segment-offset address representation to extend the range of addressable memory locations beyond what was possible using only 16-bit addresses. Programs containing more than <math>2^{16}<math> bytes (64 kilobytes) of instructions and data therefore required special routines to switch between their 64-kilobyte segments, increasing the complexity of programming 16-bit applications.

[Top]

See also

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing and is used under the GFDL.






  View Live Article   This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License