25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer" 4194

I'm not so sure about the underwhelming part. The 8088 is a lot more powerful than the 8-bit systems that were popular when the IBM PC was introduced. Writing programs larger than 64KB is quite possible on an 8088, but requires nasty, non-standard bank switching hacks on 8-bit systems.

As far as I remember, the monochrome and Hercules adapters provided a much better picture than the systems that were basically designed to be connected to a color tv.

PC clones got built-in harddisks long before that was standard on other systems.

I have to admit that I never cared much for PCs until I could afford a 386. 32 bits and a MMU are the baseline requirement (for me) for a general purpose CPU. Unfortunately, many designs based on the mc68k architecture did leave out the MMU because it was an optional extra.

-- That was it. Done. The faulty Monk was turned out into the desert where it could believe what it liked, including the idea that it had been hard done by. It was allowed to keep its horse, since horses were so cheap to make. -- Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency