As noted elsethread, there were no "legacy" (an abuse of that word) MS-DOS applications when the 80286 was designed. Intel wasn't really "doing an Apple". At

As noted elsethread, there were no "legacy" (an abuse of that word) MS-DOS applications when the 80286 was designed. Intel wasn't really "doing an Apple". At the time most people were expecting 80286es to become a second higher-end market where people ran Xenix (or perhaps a new MP/M for the 80286), separate from a low-end 8086 market with whatever tinpot non-multiuser non-virtual-memory operating systems were going to come out for it.