>Ever seen GEM? It was written for 68000, but ported to x86 - I've seen it perform on a 8MHz XT equally fast as Win3.1 performed on a 33MHz 386. And it took only 16K of EMS. And had it all.

Yeah, but GEM also didn't do squat. It was a very basic UI engine shell
with only the most primitive graphics constructs. it didn't even do
windows (not capital W <s>).

If you've ever used a GEM application (like Ventura Publisher) you
know what I mean... Even early windows versions were a huge improvement
over what GEM did.

I don't think your 16k of EMS is right either. It needed 16k of EMS for
video management, but used additional memory in the lower 640k...