16 bit programming kinda sucked. I caught the tail end of it but my first project was using Win32s so I just had to cherry-pick what I wanted to work on to avoid having to learn it at all. I was fortunate that a Hype Train with a particularly long track was about to leave the station and it was 32 bit. But everyone I worked with or around would wax poetic about what a pain in the ass 16 bit was.

Meanwhile though, the PC memory model really did sort of want memory to be divided into at least a couple of classes and we had to jump through a lot of hoops to deal with that era. Even if I wasn't coding in 16 bit I was still consuming 16 bit games with boot disks.