Fair enough. I suppose once any scheme receives full native support it becomes indistinguishable from a flat address space anyway. What's a second partition if

Fair enough. I suppose once any scheme receives full native support it becomes indistinguishable from a flat address space anyway. What's a second partition if not an additional bit? My pondering is less "why such a large address space" and more "why such a large native word size"? Extra bits don't come without costs. As long as I'm asking ridiculous questions, why not 12-bit bytes? I feel like a 12/48 system would be significantly more practical for the vast majority of everyday tasks. Is it just due to inertia at this point or have I missed some fundamental observation?