To reduce the engineering effort needed to incorporate the 8086 into designs, Intel opted for an on-board charge pump to generate the bias voltage.

Forty years ago, Intel released the 8086 processor, introducing the x86 architecture that underlies every PC—Windows, Mac, or Linux—produced today.

Intel's 8086 designers used 64-kbyte segments to extend addressing to 1 Mbyte. The 80386 also uses segmentation; however, because the general-purpose and index/pointer registers are now 32 bits, the ...