Carlos Rodrigues 🪣 on Nostr: Take the Intel 8088... 16-bit registers, but with an 8-bit data bus and 20-bit ...
Take the Intel 8088... 16-bit registers, but with an 8-bit data bus and 20-bit address bus.
Was it an 8-bit CPU? Does anyone consider the original IBM PC an 8-bit machine? And would that have been 16-bit if it had used an 8086 instead?
What about the Z80 and the 6502? Both had an 8-bit data bus and a 16-bit address bus, but only the Z80 had 16-bit registers.
At least we can agree that no system using either a Z80 or a 6502 ever called itself 16-bit, right? 🤔
2/4 🧵
#retrocomputing #cpu
Published at
2024-06-27 16:23:47Event JSON
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"content": "Take the Intel 8088... 16-bit registers, but with an 8-bit data bus and 20-bit address bus.\n\nWas it an 8-bit CPU? Does anyone consider the original IBM PC an 8-bit machine? And would that have been 16-bit if it had used an 8086 instead?\n\nWhat about the Z80 and the 6502? Both had an 8-bit data bus and a 16-bit address bus, but only the Z80 had 16-bit registers.\n\nAt least we can agree that no system using either a Z80 or a 6502 ever called itself 16-bit, right? 🤔\n\n2/4 🧵\n\n#retrocomputing #cpu",
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