Protected mode on the 286 was seriously flawed. It couldn’t run most existing DOS real mode applications without resetting the CPU, and it didn’t make it easy to access the new features. You now had a 16MB address space (up from 1MB on the 8086), but you still had to access it through 64kB segments. Protected mode on 286 actually made this worse because it added overhead when modifying segment registers, so accessing large memory areas got slower.
OS/2 1.x was designed for the 286 and couldn’t escape these limitations. In theory it was a decent improvement on MS-DOS, but in practice there wasn’t enough value to counter the lack of compatibility and the higher price.
OS/2 1.x was designed for the 286 and couldn’t escape these limitations. In theory it was a decent improvement on MS-DOS, but in practice there wasn’t enough value to counter the lack of compatibility and the higher price.