system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5 Why 64bit is "x64" but 32bit is "x86"

**Edit: Frontpage??**
gpt
Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and instead of writing programs for 64b or 32b you wrote programs for a particular instruction set architecture, the Intel 8086 processor used a particularly popular one. A lot of successors to the 8086 had names which also ended in 86, hence the family were called `x86`.

The 8086 was actually a 16b processor, but the x86 term became popular after the 32b 80386's introduction to the market.

x64 is actually a shortened version of x86-64, which is a 64b extension to the x86 instruction set. These days, x86 implies 32b only, whilst x64 means 64b.