DOS was barely an operating system, so the programs had to bundle their own drivers & speak directly to the hardware for anything more than disk/compute. Because of this, that one little 8/16 change cut Wang off from the lion's share of the PC software library--first man to the gold rush, but without a pick or a shovel.

It's a shame they didn't make it though. From a technical perspective, the old man knew what he was doing.