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.