This was kind of covered in the article. The 68000 is a weird chimera. It had 8 32 bit data registers and 7 32-bit address registers. This was to be compatible with a future 32bit world. The bus to the outside was 16-bit due to the cost of ram and the compatibility with peripherals. Remember. This was on the drawing board 76-79 before release and production before advances that drove later versions to be fully 32-bit. Same for the address space. 16-bit machines could address 64k. With 24 bits you could address space you could have a max of 16mb which was a ridiculous , near limitless amount of ram for the period. The great thing about the 68k and this 24 bit adress space was that it was a large linear address space. You didn’t have to work in 64k segments like the Intel world.
The 1MB Lisa cost U$ 10,000 and the Mac at 128k was u$2500. A large chunk of that cost was the CPU and RAM.
Nobody said that chip was 16 bit.
In my peer group, the 68k was "Moto style 16 bit" and that generally refers to how Motorola tended toward bigger registers running on top of a smaller core architecture.
That all said, a word in Moto land is 16 bits, not 32.
32 is a long word.
This is true for many 8 and 16 bit devices and I always thought the Jaguar advocates were way off base with that argument.
Anyone remember rec.games.video.advocacy?
Man, Jaguar vs 3DO was epic! As were many other long running discussions.
I like the machine and itbsoes have a 64bit path from DSP to RAM at least.
TBF we all lost by the M2 not reaching market.
RGVA was a goldmine of netkookery though, second only to CSAA
Edit: I reread that part of the article and now your comment makes more sense. But I'm just pointing out it's interesting that in 68k assembly, a "word" is 16 bits.