Gregory's Server@cstanhope In a way, the story of the 286 is the story of the end of an era. It was pretty common in the small-systems world before that for each new generation of hardware to not be backwards compatible with the previous one. It was just expected that you'd have to throw away all your old software when you moved to the next generation.
The 286 was the first time in the PC world that the previous generation had sold enough software (and had software that was being put to enough actually mission-critical purposes) that when people were asked to throw away their old software, they were like, "um, no. No way. Try again."
@jalefkowit Yeah, and the '286 was introduced just months after IBM launched their 8086 based PC. So it must've been in the works for a while, well before any of what eventually became the PC market would've maybe influenced Intel's design choices. I'm not even sure who Intel's customers were for the 8086 before IBM came along. Niche CP/M machines and embedded control applications?
Oh well, much like digital watches, I still think the '286 is neat. :)