I honestly don’t know when you are talking about. CPUs aren’t storage devices.

Gee really? Here’s me thinking 32-bit instruction sets were cosmetic. Thank you for ignoring the part where I said we’re still in a transition phase.

Also, with a bit of tinkering, you can run 16-bit applications. It’s just recommend to use virtualisation applications because Microsoft doesn’t ensure quality updates for 16 bit applications.

Well we are still kind of transitioning to 64-bit. Chip makers/designers are still having to include instruction sets for 16/32-bit which does limit in some respects on how big the transition really is.