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16-bit x86 code is ancient enough that a software emulation solution can be fast, efficient, and perfectly compatible, so there's no need to keep support for it
by TazeTSchnitzel 3y ago
16-bit x86 code is ancient enough that a software emulation solution can be fast, efficient, and perfectly compatible, so there's no need to keep support for it in hardware at this point.
Microsoft could have used emulation to keep old 16-bit x86 apps working with Windows for AMD64 (in fact they had done this before for non-x86 architectures) but I guess they weren't interested. WINE and DOSBox did it though.