Maybe another vague reason: when PCs came about in the era of the 8008...8086s, 64K of RAM was like a high, reasonable amount. So you need 16-bit pointers, whic

Maybe another vague reason: when PCs came about in the era of the 8008...8086s, 64K of RAM was like a high, reasonable amount. So you need 16-bit pointers, which require exactly 2 bytes.