Hardware virtualization with feature parity came very late. Hardware virtualization limited to real mode VMs came with the 386 itself, as the commenter you repl

Hardware virtualization with feature parity came very late. Hardware virtualization limited to real mode VMs came with the 386 itself, as the commenter you replied to mentioned. It was absolutely crucial to its success. The 286's protected mode was considered useless, more or less, because it could not coexist with DOS apps (not without severe hacks at least, stuff like resetting the entire CPU into real mode, something earlier OS/2 did by the way). Intel learned massively from that mistake and made real mode VMs a first class citizen in the 386, so I don't think it's fair to say that Intel didn't learn anything coming into the 386. Now, as I've mentioned here elsewhere, v86 had some severe warts that made it a bit painful (and that were only corrected in the Pentium and late 486s), but it worked, and it was a cornerstone feature. Which part do you think was revisionist?