Comment by richard_todd

The author assumes the way to keep segments going with larger memory would have been to change the amount of overlap, but it would have also been possible to make an 80286 where the segment registers were > 16bits, and everything else is 16 bits like before. Now you have extra segments that are still paragraphs apart and existing software could still function (you'd need new instruction variants to move data into and out of the enlarged portion of the segment registers.. call them ECS, EDS, or whatever). Anyway, just a thought.