Having or being composed of 16 bits, or binary digits. 16 bits can store up to 216, or 65536, separate values. In personal computer history, life started to get interesting around 16 bits - for example, with 65536 possible colors, you can approach photorealistic images.

This term refers to either the size of the registers in a CPU or the size of a memory pointer in the operating system. If a memory pointer is only 16 bits, the program can access only 65,536 bytes of memory.

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