Ah, you think it was intended for "security"? I always imagined one of two things: 1) Intel didn't bother implementing or properly verifying that all the state

Ah, you think it was intended for "security"? I always imagined one of two things: 1) Intel didn't bother implementing or properly verifying that all the state transitions from protected to real mode work perfectly. But just the existence of LOADALL, and its use, pretty much completely invalidates that theory. Especially now that I learned from your article that ICEs were running the CPU in protected mode... 2) They really, really wanted to lure people away from real mode, and show protected mode as the future. Real mode being deprecated, ideally you would only use it to bootstrap into protected mode and nothing else. Somewhat related to that is the very exotic Intel 80376, which was essentially a 80386 with only protected mode! https://www.pagetable.com/?p=460 https://www.pagetable.com/?p=460