With a hybrid internal design—featuring 16‑bit registers and a 16‑bit arithmetic logic unit (ALU) paired with a 20‑bit external address bus—the 8086 could directly address 1 megabyte of memory, a significant leap over its 8‑bit predecessors.
Although there were definitely other CPUs in use in the 1980s, the vast majority of microcomputers people had at home or at the office used either a [[MOS 6502]] (or one of its variants), a Zilog [[Z80]], an early member of the [[Intel 8086]] family, or a [[Motorola 68000]].
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