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 80286 microprocessors. 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^{16} bytes (64 kibibytes) of instructions and data therefore required special instructions to switch between their 64-kibibyte segments, increasing the complexity of programming 16-bit applications.

See also

• Win32s
• 32-bit application

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