Comment by forinti
7 years ago
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.