286 systems generally didn’t have programmable on-chip clock oscillators for the CPU. There was an external clock chip that generated the exact frequency needed for the CPU; sometimes there was another setting for a reduced speed for compatibility. If you changed this clock, you’d also disturb all the other I/O that depended on it.

I can see why you won! In the early 80s, just building the clock circuitry to generate arbitrary frequencies for the CPU only would have been quite an engineering feat.