= History =
Developed in the mid‑1970s as a response to the growing need for greater processing power and memory capacity, the 8086 was designed to bridge the gap between earlier 8‑bit processors (like the Intel [[8080 ]] and 8085) and the future of 16‑bit computing.
The chip’s design was partly influenced by the need to maintain some backward compatibility with 8‑bit software while also providing a richer instruction set for high‑level languages such as Pascal and PL/M.