Its yet another club that MS can use against the OEMs.

Don't like what MS demands for the desktop? Oops, I guess we can't sell your laptops in the stores anymore.

Promise to ditch linux? Yeah, we can make space for your wares in the stores.

This isn't good news for vendors no matter how you slice it.

No. the 286 and 386 are very different CPUs and the linux kernel cannot be compiled for it.

well, why were you carrying a giant razor blade?

Those should have been multiplies by 160 instead of 80.

Being in C, it is easier to see what the person writing it was doing, compared to assembly.

Consider if you had to do some nasty computation such as finding what address is used for a given row and column on the screen:
(in bad assembly)

mov ax, row
mov bx, col
shl col,#1
xor dx,dx
mul ax,#80
add ax,bx
mov pos,ax

Whereas in C it is:

pos=(row*80)+(col*2);

and much more readable.