Do you (or anyone) have some idea why anyone could possibly have thought 16 bits would be enough? Many decisions are bad in hindsight but surely no hindsight was needed for that.
IIRC the real rationale is back in the early days people bet that 16 bits would be enough for a fixed length encoding, but the bet didn't pay off and now they're stuck with the worst of both worlds.
Just as many as all of the 8-bit systems in use today. There is no need, in the vast majority of cases, for wide data busses in embedded applications. 16-bit is going to die out, though, like the 4-bit and bitslice processors.
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