I agree with most of what you said except for the statement that "there was a 32-bit kernel running on top of this 16-bit foundation". The 32-bit kernel didn't

I agree with most of what you said except for the statement that "there was a 32-bit kernel running on top of this 16-bit foundation". The 32-bit kernel didn't run on top of 16-bit anything. If anything it ran on top of the 32-bit VMM (virtual machine manager), as did the DOS compatibility layer.