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Meanwhile, roughly contemporaneously, the Motorola 68000 was a CPU with 32-bit registers and a 16-bit bus (there was also the 68008 which had an 8-bit bus) - but in the 80s both the PC and 68000 devices were generally referred to as 16-bit. I guess the argument is that the 8088 was a cut down 8086 (an unambiguously 16-bit CPU) while the 68k family didn't ship a 32-bit bus until the 68020, but it's interesting how handwavy terminology is here (see also the "64 bit" Atari Jaguar)

For those interested, the start of much of this was Federico Fagin with the 4-bit 4004 and its immediate successors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin

Its kind of funny, in a history panel of Intel they badically talk about how they lost this generation. The Z80 and 6502 were beating them almost everywhere. Logically IBM should have used the Z80 but they didn't most likely because Exxon was at that time trying to attack IBM and Exxon was a major investor in Zilog.

2017