Not the restaurant “86,” though.
In the PC world, the various processors had “86” in their numbers (until recently, anyway).
What was the relevance or significance of the “86” part?
I don’t know why I’m answering this, since I’m absolutely positive an exhaustively researched answer is on its way, perhaps even beating me out by a few seconds. But anyway, I believe there’s no significance at all to the “86” besides the fact that IBM chose Intel’s 8086 chip to power their first PCs. Intel had other processors with other model numbers, but they just didn’t get as well known. When Intel went to upgrade their chips they kept the “86” part for the brand recognition. Personally, I knew what “286” meant long before I’d heard of Intel.
Better informed people feel free to shoot me down. I’m used to it by now.
The x86 name comes from a chip introduced by Intel in the early 1980s: the 80286. Here’s a fine bit of nostalgia, courtesy of http://www.x86.org:
*"The Intel 8086, a new microcomputer, extends the midrange 8080 family into the 16-bit arena. The chip has attributes of both 8- and 16-bit processors. By executing the full set of 8080A/8085 8-bit instructions plus a powerful new set of 16-bit instructions, it enables a system designer familiar with existing 8080 devices to boost performance by a factor of as much as 10 while using essentially the same 8080 software package and development tools.
“The goals of the 8086 architectural design were to extend existing 8080 features symmetrically, across the board, and to add processing capabilities not to be found in the 8080. The added features include 16-bit arithmetic, signed 8- and 16-bit arithmetic (including multiply and divide), efficient interruptible byte-string operations, and improved bit manipulation. Significantly, they also include mechanisms for such minicomputer-type operations as reentrant code, position-independent code, and dynamically relocatable programs. In addition, the processor may directly address up to 1 megabyte of memory and has been designed to support multiple-processor configurations.”*
– Intel Corporation, February, 1979
So an x86 (i.e. 286, 386, 486, Pentium, etc.) incorporates all of the 8-bit goodness of the 8085 with the additional power of 16-bit instructions as well. Wow! It can multiply and divide!