[Teknoman117]

Hardware multitasking and context switch on interrupt as well.

Admittedly I didn't live through that time period, but reading about them, they are quite interesting. It seems that the main reason they were considered "brain-dead" was because you couldn't run 8086 native and 286 native software at the same time, and backwards compatibility and interoperability started becoming something people considered very important.

Interesting enough that I went and bought a static core 286 (the 25 MHz Harris one) to play with. Since it's a static core I can run it at whatever frequency I want, even if that is only a few hertz.

https://imgur.com/gallery/LKAh7fB https://gist.github.com/teknoman117/342b43db8b79652c1c91e78e...

Things to keep me sane during the pandemic isolation :)