You will notice that the operating system always allocates at least 4KB (1 page) of memory, even although only 1 byte may be specified in the allocation request. This is because all memory management in OS/2 Version 2.0 is handled on a per-page basis, using the flat memory model. The page is the lowest level of granularity in OS/2 Version 2.0; this differs from previous versions of OS/2, which had a byte-level granularity.
This principle applies to all memory protection and memory access types (read, write, etc.). This allows a programmer to use more memory for read/write than is actually requested in an allocation request as shown in step 1, provided that memory is within the physical page boundary.