Well, the PC was truly booming when U8 dropped and I hoped it would recapture the Garriot touch from the 1980's.
U3 was my intro which was a huge world and an epic grind for gold. U4 blew us all away with its depth. Remember at the time titles like Bards Tale and Wizardry were the main go-tos for party based RPG. So U4 was truly epic with it's NPC interaction and depth of plot.
But this was still the 1980's when Apple //e's mostly dominated the computer game scene. The big switch to PC happened around U5, but for those of us still shelling out money for the franchise, it became repetitive with U6 and U7. Odd that Garriot would blame EA for the NFL cycle when Ultima started to feel like it.
Ultima Underworld was a fun preview of 3D and a refreshing departure from the tops down U# series, but U8 just ... hurt. I had bought my first Pentium machine and was quite disappointed with how much of a departure it was. You literally leveled up by whacking things, anything, thousands of times. The plot was lame, the game play was uninteresting.
But I was already bored of Ultima titles by that point, so it was more tedious than reviled. I think until UOnline, U4 was the high watermark, IMHO.
Great article though, it was written with care by a fellow enthusiast of times long gone.