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 2¹⁶ 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.

See also

• Win32s
• 32-bit application