Reply 40 of 98, by kant explain
dionb wrote on 2018-09-22, 13:30:wrote:My thoughts here are that the 8086 and 80186 were rather 'unfortunate' products in the history of the PC.
That is, they were 16-bit CPUs in an era where the 'real' PC platform was still 8-bit. 16-bit ISA slots and chipsets were not introduced until the PC/AT with the 286 CPU. So I have never seen a 'full' 16-bit machine based on an 8086 or 80186. They were generally XT-class machines with a 16-bit CPU shoehorned in for some reason, but not taking full advantage.Given the 8086 precedes both the 8088 and PC/XT itself, it's rather the case that the PC was a rather unfortunate low-end, (for 1981) low-budget implementation of the x86 architecture than anything else. The only reason it became dominant was marketing.
There were certainly full 16 bit designs based on the 8086, Olivetti's M24 (sold as AT&T 6300 in the US) comes to mind. The 16 bit bus was fully functional and utilized for video and memory cards. Theoretically any other type of card could also have been made for it - but as no one else used the same 16b bus and it was completely different (electrically and physically) to the later AT bus, there were no further peripherals made for it. However that had nothing to do with technical implementation - which was decidedly superior to PC and XT - but simply due to market conditions.
Someone mentions the NEC PC98 series in this thread. It didn't use anything resembling isa slots, but rather c-bus, which plugged into the backside of tne puter. I want to say it's a full blown 16 bit bus as the 1st generation PC 9800 (9801?) used an 8086. As did the gringo variant, the NEC APC III. Don't forget the original APC which was a technological Kraken. It's card cage had a lot of resemblance to the Multibus and OMG IS THIS TBREAD BECOMING CONVOLUTED 😀