I had a 286 with 1MB of RAM. It had a chips and technologies chipset that used that RAM to shadow the ROM BIOS but you could also have it put memory anywhere i

I had a 286 with 1MB of RAM. It had a chips and technologies chipset that used that RAM to shadow the ROM BIOS but you could also have it put memory anywhere in the upper memory area that was free. So I too religiously optimized conventional/upper memory because that was all the memory that I had.