I remember travelling to NY with my father for turism, but also taking the opportunity to buy an original ibm PC XT for 5000 dollars, which was half of what it costed at my home country. IBM PC AT with a powerful 286 was already out but much more expensive. And we were too newbies to know that we could get a PC clone.
Anyway, I remember there was both the Amiga and the Atari ST. But my father wanted an IBM. You know, nobody got fired for buying IBM ;)
I have very little respect for the IBM PC. It was huge, heavy, loud, slow (writing characters via the BIOS had to wait for the blanking intervals on CGA or you’d get “snow”). My Apple II booted up faster, loaded programs faster and could print to the screen faster than the monitor could refresh.
Ya. At the time, I was an Apple partisan. I just could not understand how the PC XT was more successful than the Apple, Atari, and Commodore computers.
With hindsight, it was probably my first experience with "worse is better".
A phenomenon I still don't understand, frankly. JavaScript? ffs.
I think, what is often overlooked as to why the PC won the market is exactly its hi-res textmodes;
1) The BIOS was insanely slow yes. But on the other hand it was really fast when you wrote to the screen memory directly (address $B8000).
An entire screen in 720x400 resolution VGA, was represented by just 80x25x2=4000 bytes (2 bytes per char code + color attributes). A single plane bitmat graphics mode (just black and white) in same resolution would be 36000 bytes.
So scrolling through documents/spreadsheets was very fast compared to graphics modes, which most other platforms used. And screens used less memory.
The simple text-modes were also really easy to develop for.
2) The high-res text (720x400x16) and graphics modes (640x480x16) on VGA were non-interlaced (unlike e.g. the first Amigas), so they felt more solid and you could work with them longer before getting tired.
While this is true - it is possible to bypass the BIOS (at the cost of "snow" on early CGA adapters), most of the competition for the IBM PC also had text modes. My Apple II+ running CP/M had a board with a 6845 CRTC, the same used in the CGA and MDA. Apple ///, //e and others had 80-column text modes pretty much built-in. While the memory layout on the Apple II was more complicated, you could call routines in ROM that were very fast. The same approach was used in later machines such as the Amiga, the Mac and the STs - using the ROM or OS routines was the standard way to do things, much like bypassing the BIOS and directly addressing the hardware was the standard way to work on the PC (remember how the "gold standard" of compatibility was being able to run Flight Simulator). With these later machines, we learned that looking to the hardware from too close was a compatibility issue.
Anyway, I remember there was both the Amiga and the Atari ST. But my father wanted an IBM. You know, nobody got fired for buying IBM ;)