First time I used an IBM PC I thought it was awful. I was used to 8 bit micros that had: colour, OS in ROM, BASIC in ROM, and sound.
You couldn't do anything with it before you used at least two disks: one for DOS and the other with an application.
I thought business people liked them because they wanted boring machines on purpose.
And then came the 16 bits machines: Amiga, ST, etc. And then the Acorn Archimedes. And IBM PCs were still awful. They started to make sense to me when 386s came about.
The 386's weren't even that great for games/graphics. Most games were still 286-compatible, and if you had a 386SX you might as well have had a 286. I remember being blown away by a friends Tandy because of the graphics and sound card it had, even though it was basically an IBM PC underneath.
The CGA graphics options on the IBM really didn't do them any favors. EGA wasn't much better but at least you could do games like Commander Keen. I remember playing games like Prince of Persia, BattleChess, and thinking "Finally. My friends with Atari and Amiga (and even Apple) computers have had these games for years."
It really took a 486 and a VGA card to let the PC start to shine. And then once the 3D games started coming out (Doom, Descent), you didn't even need a console anymore.
> if you had a 386SX you might as well have had a 286
Agreed. My family bought a 386sx/16 at my convincing, but based on the way we wound up using the machine, one of the contemporary 286/20's would have been a better choice. Not only was our 386sx relatively slow, the 386-specific features didn't really benefit our use case all that much and added additional overhead. (We bought it with the idea of running multiple DOS apps via DesqView/386, but never did... then Windows 3.0 breathed new life into 286 protected mode.)
> The CGA graphics options on the IBM really didn't do them any favors.
CGA was a terrible, terrible set of trade offs. The high resolution mode wasn't, and the color graphics mode was restricted to two fixed palettes of marginal utility. The Tandy 1000's 32K of video memory and 16 color 320x200 graphics were a huge improvement. (So was Hercules.)
Even worse were things like the Cyrix 486SLC(?), they were cheaply made systems and I think even some of them ran on 286 motherboards. A friend had one and it was every bit as slow as a 16MHz 386
Yeah... the thing I didn't mention about my family's old 386sx/16 was that it was similar to what you describe.
That machine was an ALR PowerFlex, which came out of the box as a 286/12. However, it also had a special CPU upgrade slot that allowed installation of higher end CPUs on daughterboards. Our machine had a 386sx/16 on a daughterboard, but ALR let you install CPU's as fast as a 486DX/25 into what was fundamentally a 286 box. If you didn't mind your state of the art 486 being limited to 5MB of 16-bit memory, it wasn't a bad choice. (This machine started my general thinking that upgradable hardware is overrated as a long term plan to keep equipment viable.)
Earlier than that, Cheetah made something reminiscent of this called the Adapter/386. It was a cheap way to install a 386 into a 286 machine. This gave you the ability to run 80386 specific software, but actually wound up making the machine a little slower. My guess is that they didn't sell many, and the primary takers were developers that wanted to get a cheap way to develop 80386-specific software without buying a new machine.
Correction , a 386 with SVGA card
I played Doom, Descent, Wolfstein 3d, Dune, Dune 2, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Warcraft II, Sim City 2000 and Hexen on a simple AMD 386@40 with 4 MiB of RAM and OAK SVGA 1MiB that my father build self.
The IBM PC came with Basic in ROM as well as the ability to load and save programs to tape. It was also available with color graphics.
...Of course most were sold with monochrome graphics and the clones cut out the built in Basic because it was IBM's code, as well as the tape routines, because floppies were so prevalent.
80 column support was key. More or less CP/M compatibility was also key.
One thing the 8088 PC had compared with the 8-bits was rudimentary memory management in the form of the segment registers. This decoupled the OS and BIOS from application code in a way that was not possible on previous 8-bits. People forget that in the world before memory management that if you wanted to change the OS your only option was to do something like "sysgen" a horrible slow process where you re-linked the OS and all application code. IBM's OS 360 and DEC's RSX-11 had this concept.
People hated segment registers, but the only other alternative was position independent code, like on the 6809. I would argue that this is worse, because it slows execution time.
> First time I used an IBM PC I thought it was awful.
It was a great business machine, though obviously you needed two floppy drives or, in my case, the massive 10 megabyte hard drive in the PC/XT.
You got a really great keyboard and a superb green screen, it was fast (for its day), and you had your pick of software. Lotus 1-2-3 was obviously the key program, though you needed a separate monitor for graphics. Word Perfect soon became the key word processor. Borland's Sidekick was a great utility.
You could add loads of expansion cards, and I added an extra 512K (which came as 18 chips in two plastic tubes) for only £999. This enabled the PC/XT to run Microsoft Xenix, which was the most popular Unix at the time.
I'd had an Apple II before that, with two external floppies and Apple's really crappy green screen monitor (no lower case). The PC/XT was a massive upgrade, as a business machine.
Of course, you couldn't play Choplifter with two paddles, but that wasn't a job requirement. However, you could get Microsoft Flight Simulator and, later on, DOOM and Civilization etc.
However, there was a period between the XT and/or AT when the alternatives were better, I had an Atari 720ST and a Mega 4, an Amiga 500 and a 1500, and an Acorn Archimedes. In fact, I still have some of those. It was the arrival of the 386, Windows 3 and CD-ROMs that started to finish those off.
If you had a system with only one floppy, you still had an A: and a B: drive. Any access to (virtual) B: would prompt you to insert the other floppy, and I/O would continue until the disk in A: was needed, and you'd be prompted to swap floppies again.
You couldn't do anything with it before you used at least two disks: one for DOS and the other with an application.
I thought business people liked them because they wanted boring machines on purpose.
And then came the 16 bits machines: Amiga, ST, etc. And then the Acorn Archimedes. And IBM PCs were still awful. They started to make sense to me when 386s came about.