It's hard to argue against a counterfactual, but I believe there is a "sweet spot" for the size of the basic memory unit, and that "sweet spot" is probably in t

It's hard to argue against a counterfactual, but I believe there is a "sweet spot" for the size of the basic memory unit, and that "sweet spot" is probably in the range from 4 to 16 bits (power of two sizes are desirable, so the possible sizes would be 4 bits, 8 bits, and 16 bits), so even if computers evolved from scratch today already starting with large memories, the basic unit of memory addressing still wouldn't be that big. My guess is that the chosen size would be 16 bits.