There was that time I used my 12 MHz 286 to develop software for a Z-80 based CP/M machine and I could emulate the Z-80 faster than a real Z-80.
Graphics and sound really did suck compared to machines specialized for that. The best you could do for games at the time were tile systems like the Nintendo NES and the TI-99/4A which were not that different from text mode except the ‘font’ was customizable and the tiles were square. The Atari 400/800 normalized changing your video mode on every scan line but the C-64 had the best system balance in terms of quality output on an NTSC television.
The EGA introduced tricks that would let you make the video card copy multiple planes of data at the same time, also you could do some pretty neat tricks with the palette to make layers that blended like sprites. I see Commander Keen as a watershed because it had scrolling as good as Super Mario Brothers and ran on the EGA. Of course they figured out Mode X for the VGA and we got Doom a few years later.
Obviously, you couldn't buy a hundred thousand GTIA or VIC-II chips and solder them into ISA cards, but there were some non-exclusive options-- the graphics chips used on MSX hardware, for example.
There were definitely low-end PCs that would have been able to tread into the "home computer" space occupied by the C64 and Atari 800, by price and design (there were a few 8088-class "PC in the keyboard" designs-- some Tandy 1000s, and a Vtech/Laser one come to mind), but they were hardly the ones kids were gonna beg their parents for with those mediocre graphics.
New Mexico Tech had Sun workstations based on SPARC and in 1993 the talk was of Linux because a 386 machine would beat a Sun workstation easily.
Other 32 bit machines like the high-end Amigas and the Atari Falcon 030 could not keep up. Macs were expensive but sold well because of the refined GUI but when Windows 95 came out with an adequate GUI, Apple went into crisis.
The 286 was "brain damaged" for implementing operating systems according to Bill Gates for two reasons: (1) you could not get back to real mode without doing a terrible hack resetting the whole machine, (2) you could not write to segment registers at all from user mode so writing programs that use more than a 64k data segment and 64 k code segment means doing an OS call.
The 386 on the other hand took forever to get to the point where a 32-bit OS was mainstream, from 1985 release of the 386 to 1995. Some of us (me) were using Linux before then, but that was it.
My conclusion about the 286 being pivotal came from my own experience (switched in 1987) and also looking at old issues of Byte magazine circa 1987 and seeing that all the advertisers were in a state of turmoil. For instance some firms like Cromeco who sold S-100 bus and CP/M machines to OEM's to put, say, a cash register system in a supermarket were giving up the ghost because PC's were crushing them. Similarly there were ads for PC clone makers all over the place but anything associated with the 8-bits was vanished. The original IBM PC was much more expensive than 8-bit machines but not much better in terms of power, PC AT clones were still more expensive but they were so much more powerful that it was worth it.
The big change I saw was in the early 90s when 386 PCs with VGA displays became common place. This is when the people I knew upgraded and 8088 machines completely faded from the scene. The killer app driving 386 sales was Windows 3.0.
I went with dad and brother a few times, and yes, middle-aged computer guys selling stuff. I was always more excited by the hardware than software, so I didn't check out those tables so much.
My company, Magicomm, wrote 3rd party add-ons for the main system and eventually my partner was hired on with them directly...me? Not so lucky I remember interviewing directly with the owner, Tim Striker, and I was so nervous because I wanted to work there so badly...I almost completely blanked out for the interview and couldn't remember even the simplest of C basics. (Describe an union, what command do you use to zero out memory after you malloc etc etc)
I bombed the interview and never did get to work for my dream company like my partner, who I basically trained on how to use C, did, and to this day this fact irks me lol.
I do remember though spending a lot of time at All Books and Records on Sunrise Blvd (I think) next to the Sears. Coolest book and record store around except for maybe Robert A Hittel’s bookstore on Federal Hwy..
Also spent a lot of time going to Sunshine Software on Cypress Creek Rd.. kind of a magical place run by two rly cool computer dudes..
It took years for the pc game industry to become as good as the 8bit era.
Doom changed everything of course.
Maybe once the 386 came along then PC stepped into the picture
https://archive.org/details/byte-1988-07_202104/page/n379/mo...
The entry-level price of a C128 was much less but if you add a disk drive and a monitor so you can use the 80 column mode you're not saving that much money. The 286 machine is a lot more computer at $1100, the 386 is twice that.
I had a hard time finding any 8088 machines advertised in Byte in 1990. To be fair Byte was aimed at the high end of the market, yet, Byte had plenty of coverage of the early 8-bitters, but I think the C-64 didn't get covered in Byte proportional to its popularity because it was late enough to the party that the IBM PC was getting mindshare.
Byte had an odd mismatch between what was getting advertised (you'd have thought Cromeco was really something, other vendors of S-100 bus machines that supported CP/M were big) and was getting written about (low-end 8-bitters got a lot more press than CP/M ever did)