My parents called this before Wolfenstein even came out, though they did it with the Commodore 64 and 128. I really wanted a 128, and they insisted on an IBM compatible instead.
I was devastated at the time, but they were 100% correct in hindsight.
I was devastated at the time, but they were 100% correct in hindsight.
In 1988, I had saved up for an Amiga, but my father offered to match what I had saved for a hard drive if I bought a PC instead.
The PC was 15x as expensive as the C128 and still wasn’t any good for gaming. While C128 had the entire C64 games library available!
It also had the CP/M software library and could run productivity software in 80 columns. Yes CP/M software wasn’t as good as DOS software, yes your spreadsheets didn’t calculate as quickly, but for a couple of years the C128 was the best option, until the Amiga came along.
The Amiga was certainly the best option in 1988. Arguably it was the best until about 1995.
BASIC was actually slower on the original PC than on the 6502 and the Z80.
It wasn't long before I admitted how correct they were.
I believe the out of the store price was something like $2,300. With a model below that available for under $2,000, I think with less ram or only one floppy or something. But anyway this was for a fairly atypical take on the PC and a regular white box of the same era could have been had for perhaps half of that with the same or better specs.
That said, I was a kid, so I don't really remember the numbers well.
We were definitely not rich.
My first was a 386/20, which had a problem and Circuit City's guarantee saw us trade it out for a "better" computer for free... That turned out to be a 386/16. I didn't know enough about them at the time to spot the problem.
It wasn't long before I had a 486, though, so the problem wasn't long-lived. I've never forgiven them for the deception, but they went out of business, so I guess I won? (I see they're back now somehow. Wow, what a joke.)
Things definitely changed with 386s and Windows.