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Comment by dep_b

7 years ago

> He said going with the 8088 set the industry back ten years.

That's what it always felt like as an Amiga user. Not before DOOM there was much I liked on the PC.

Release Amiga 1000: July '85 Release DOOM: December '94

I saw an Amiga once in person around 86 and spent that next decade disappointed, but advocating that the future of computing was going to be great. Emotionally I still feel like we haven't caught up to the Amiga but I imagine that isn't really true, heh.

Similar story with me. I got an Amiga 1000 and did a fair bit of assembly coding on it, then ended up writing some 16-bit x86 assembly for school later on. Being used to having sixteen 32-bit registers, then all the sudden having to use AX, BX, CX, and DX (and don't forget they all have slightly different purposes!) was like being brutally shoved back into the 80's.

I must have been 12 or 13 years old when I first met an IBM PC. I was used to 8 bit micros having BASIC right away (and colour). But you couldn't do anything with a PC before using two floppies. First DOS then whatever. It just seemed awful. Why would anyone want one of those?

  • I was used to all the 8 bit machines and their graphics and sound too, but I was enthralled by 80 column BASIC and DOS with its hierarchal file system as well. I saw it as a separate branch of computing entirely.

    And once EGA came out, it quickly started to surpass the 8 bits as a gaming platform too.

  • That's not correct. If you don't have a floppy disk, the PC boots into ROM BASIC just like the 8-bit home computers of the time.