Editing Intel 8086 (section)

====Porting older software====
Small programs could ignore the segmentation and just use plain 16-bit addressing. This allows [[8-bit computing|8-bit]] software to be quite easily ported to the 8086. The authors of most [[DOS]] implementations took advantage of this by providing an [[Application Programming Interface]] very similar to [[CP/M]] as well as including the simple ''.com'' executable file format, identical to CP/M. This was important when the 8086 and MS-DOS were new, because it allowed many existing CP/M (and other) applications to be quickly made available, greatly easing acceptance of the new platform.