Sure, there is clearly some "rose-colored memory" effect going on - how could there not be? As someone who used Amigas, Atari STs, Macs and PCs back in the day - and who still owns over a hundred unique models of vintage 80s and 90s computers, they ALL suck in many annoying ways AND most had some unique strengths. We all learned to live with what we had and how to make it do what we needed done.
People got accustomed to whatever personal computer they used every day and many grew fond of it. After all, the power and capability of a desktop computer in the 80s was unprecedented and, for many, revelatory. That said, in the mid-to-late 80s, the PC platform was generally under-powered dollar for dollar compared to most of its leading competitors, most of which were based on Motorola 680x0 CPUs. The strength of the PC during this time was it's rapidly expanding library of business software applications and hardware expansion options in the form of add-in cards (something which Apple had with the Apple II but abandoned for a while with the Mac, the Atari ST never really had and only the "professional" series Amiga's had (A2000, A3000, A4000).
Being underpowered per dollar doesn't mean the PC couldn't be extremely useful or the best platform for a given scenario and it certainly doesn't mean there weren't hobbyists who used and loved their late 80s PCs as dearly as any other 80s personal computer owner. Of course, this power balance was largely addressed by the mid-90s - which is why the PC juggernaut then extinguished the Amiga, Atari and (very nearly) the Mac.
I don't think we negotiate the same phenomenon. You seem to describe the harmless, almost romantic indulgences of nostalgics. I talk about the bizarre, often enough toxic distorsions of a certain breed of user, who still fights, after all these years, their Platform War. The sort of fan who blames "the PC" for the "ills of the industry".
Anyway, off to some specifics:
> "The strength of the PC during this time was it's rapidly expanding library of business software applications and hardware expansion options in the form of add-in cards [...]".
A standardized general-purpose computing platform "for the future". Exactly what spoke to me, as disseminated in the publications I read as a kid in 1991.
> "Of course, this power balance was largely addressed by the mid-90s - which is why the PC juggernaut then extinguished the Amiga, Atari and (very nearly) the Mac."
"Power balance"? I didn't think in such abstracts when I made my choice, and conducted the long and merciless attrition-lobbying campaign for financial support, to buy a PC. The Amigas and the Ataris were simply not a factor for a variety of different, but very tangible and practical reasons:
Atari ST? I was not (on my way to become) a musician with the need for a precise and affordable backpack-portable computer instrument.
Amigas? The big birds were seen, outside of some specialist-niches, as uneconomical compared to their IBM-compatible brethren.
The vanilla home computers were seen as affordable, but extremely limited, racking-up (hidden) secondary costs to make them more usable. Often enough they carried a certain cultural stigma as well, being perceived by our financiers as gaming toys and therefore time wasters. And most importantly? No one I personally knew had an Amiga. Who to swap software with, where to find a mentor? Yeah...
The Atari guys I befriended used their machines almost exclusively for dabbling in electronic music, later as part of the emerging East German EBM and hard techno scene.
Games? The titles I was interested in either didn't exist on M68k platforms (flight simulations à la Aces of the Pacific, wargames such as the Harpoon series, or adventures like The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes), were practically unplayable (e. g. Red Baron), considered inferior (e. g. Wing Commander)... or just came out too late.
By listening to stories of some Britons of my age, it only recently came to my attention how privileged I have actually been. Some of these people told me stories of buying their first A600s or A1200s only in 1993! At that time it was hard to separate me from my trusty, second-hand PC... a machine with a CPU-type nearing its eighth (!) birthday (386DX-25).
You’re talking about the 90s though. Thats actually several generations of PC later.
PCs in the 80s were so bad that most homes still ran 8-bit micros with a BASIC ROM.
Windows 3.0 wasn’t even released until 1990.
And let’s be honest, the problems with autoexec.bat, config.sys and different incompatible DOS drivers for games existed throughout. It was only really the uptake of DirectX that fixed that (and to an extent, Rage / OpenGL, but you could technically get DOS drivers for them too).
But that was a whole generation of computers away from the 3.x era of PCs, and another generation again from the 80s.
But by the mid-90s, we had a whole new set of problems with PCs: the OS silently corrupting itself. It was so bad that best practice advice was to reformat and reinstalling Windows every 6 months (I did it much less regularly than that though). And this was a common idiom throughout the entire life of the 9x era of Windows too. But to be fair, that was also a common idiom with pre-OSX Macs too. Apple had become painfully shit at the point too.
If The ST and Amiga were still evolving like PCs were, then by the late 90s I’m sure Amigas might have suffered from the same longevity problems too. But in the 80s, they (and STs, Macintoshes, and Acorn Archimedes) were stood head and shoulders above what PCs could do at that point in almost every regard.
> You’re talking about the 90s though. Thats actually several generations of PC later.
I'm East German; you people got a headstart. My relevant hands-on experience is centered around a 386DX system, technology introduced in the mid-Eighties. 1987 brought VGA, AdLib, and MT-32s to the table, with games support gearing up in '89, the year the Sound Blaster was released. Fall 1990 saw the release of Wing Commander. Of course that's just technology, economical realities tell a different story.
> Windows 3.0 wasn’t even released until 1990.
Windows was as relevant to me as an Amiga. GUIs didn't do much for me until much later. Still prefer CLIs, TUIs (and minimal GUIs that come as close to the latter as possible).
> And let’s be honest, the problems with autoexec.bat, config.sys and different incompatible DOS drivers for games existed throughout.
I never experienced serious troubles in DOS. The first two, and only, games I could not get to work were two infamously bug-ridden Windows titles of the late 90s: Falcon 4.0 and Privateer: The Darkening. By the time they fixed 'em with a litany of patches I was busy with other things.
> But by the mid-90s, we had a whole new set of problems with PCs: the OS silently corrupting itself.
News to me. How bizarre!
> But in the 80s, they (and STs, Macintoshes, and Acorn Archimedes) were stood head and shoulders above what PCs could do at that point in almost every regard.
Hardware? Until '87. Games? Until late '90 I'd say, at the earliest, accounting for a strong genre bias. [1] Then, outside of niches (Video Toaster, cheap DTP, music production) and certain "creature comforts", it was over; the eco system began to atrophy.
1. The first two DOS-platformers that wowed me visually were Prince of Persia 2 ('93) and Aladdin ('93/'94); all my other genre preferences were, to put it diplomatically, underserved on 16-bit home computers.
That doesn’t mean PCs were somehow more capable in the 80s though ;)
> Windows was as relevant to me as an Amiga.
Same point as above.
> I never experienced serious troubles in DOS.
I think that’s probably rose tinted glasses on your part then. The pain was real. Games seldom “just worked” and you often had to be really knowledgeable in your system to get stuff working.
To this day, I’ve never heard the music in Transport Tycoon because that game refused to work with whatever midi drivers I threw at it.
> > But by the mid-90s, we had a whole new set of problems with PCs: the OS silently corrupting itself.
> News to me. How bizarre!
I’d be amazed if you’ve never once heard about the old problem of computers getting slower or buggier over time and a reinstall fixing things.
> Hardware? Until '87.
You’re comparing theoretical top of the line PC hardware (which nobody actually owned and no one had written software for yet) with commodity Amigas and STs.
And even those top of the line PCs still missed a few tricks that made some genres of games better on Amigas and Atari STs, like fast blitters.
It wasn’t until the era of ray casting 2.5D 1st person shooter that PCs started looking better than their counterparts. And then things really accelerated (no pun intended) with 3D hardware graphics acceleration. Which, to be fair, was available for Amigas too, but the only software that targeted them were 3D rendering farms.
> That doesn’t mean PCs were somehow more capable in the 80s though ;)
It clarifies specifics relating to my personal experiences with the discussion matter, addressing (perceived) realities of a local market. How people use computers is of the utmost relevance; a fact which you, given your lamentations here, certainly must have internalized.
> I think that’s probably rose tinted glasses on your part then. The pain was real. Games seldom “just worked” and you often had to be really knowledgeable in your system to get stuff working.
No rose-tinted glasses here. And I believe you that your and others' pain was real. Many people could not work their heads around a PC; many of 'em fell for cheap SX clunkers with other substandard components, ffs. That's obviously an inherent problem of such an open platform: PCs are highly individual in many subtle ways; a trade-off one had, and still has, to negotiate in one fashion or another.
> You’re comparing theoretical top of the line PC hardware (which nobody actually owned and no one had written software for yet) with commodity Amigas and STs.
I'm comparing hardware available on the market (with key system components coming together in 1987/88, and games supporting such top-of-the-line hardware showing up in numbers from '88 onwards). I also spoke to economical realities in nearly every post in this disc; I am well aware that 16-bit home birds had a technical lead for a short while, and were an even better value proposition for many people a while longer. For some, just as valid, this still holds true.
> And even those top of the line PCs still missed a few tricks that made some genres of games better on Amigas and Atari STs, like fast blitters.
Yes, already addressed by referring to Prince of Persia 2 and Aladdin (1993/94!).
> It wasn’t until the era of ray casting 2.5D 1st person shooter that PCs started looking better than their counterparts.
So, your stylistic (genre) preference maps it into the time between 1991 (with Hovertank 3D in April as well as Catacomb 3-D in November) and Wolfenstein 3D (May 1992). Okay.
With mine it begins earlier, largely because of proper 3D-titles: Deathtrack (1989, PC-exclusive), LHX: Attack Chopper (1990, no Amiga/Atari port), and Red Baron (1990, got the Amiga slideshow in 1992), as well as the odd non-3D action title here and there, e. g. Silpheed (1989, no Amiga/Atari port).
One can probably go even back to 1988, for at least parity in certain markets and their segments, if one compares the technological edge in an intellectually honest fashion, i. e. what the platform, hardware and software, was really technically capable of.
And productivity software, part of the deal, is of course its very own world.
I’m not talking about personal preference. I’m talking about the wider industry.
As I said before, I had a PC back then. I used to write software for them. I know how the hardware and software compared with other systems out there at the same time.
If you were in East Germany at the time, then you wouldn’t have had an accurate view of what was happening in the industry. You would have had your own brands of things because it wasn’t as easy (or even possible) to import western products. And by the time the wall fell and the borders had opened up, PCs had reached parity with their contemporaries. So of course Atari STs and Amigas weren’t common items and PCs seemed like better devices from your perspective. But surely you have to also understand that your experiences aren’t a typical snapshot of the computer industry in the 80s. In fact they’re about as atypical as it gets.
You’d have been better off saying something like “things were a lot different in Soviet Germany” and we could have had a more interesting and productive insight into what life was like for yourself. Instead you’ve been talking about your own experiences like it was a fact of how those products compared to each other (which is where you’re wrong) rather than what devices made it to your borders (which you were correct on). You do understand how they’re different arguments?
But in the late 1980s, oh my. An Amiga 500 in 1987 was really a lot better than a PC of the time for many things. It was also a lot cheaper. Maybe half the price. The Amiga and the Atari ST didn't improve enough by 1991. By then a PC was better.
But by 1988 the PC was so far outselling everything else that the writing was on the wall.
People who had Amigas and Atari STs couldn't quite understand how their machines, that they perceived as so much better, were being outclassed by PCs running MS-DOS. On an Amiga 500 in 1987 you had a decent GUI. Until Windows 3 PCs didn't.
For example, Pro-Write on the Amiga having real time spell checking and being WYSIWYG in the late 1980s. It wasn't until Word 6 in 1993 that Word was really much better.
The big advantage we had on Atari and Amiga was that the 68000 could address more than 640K without a sweat. PC's had this annoying limit up until the 90s and the complexity that it introduced was mind blowing (EMM, EMS, XMS etc.).
In 87 when I was student at University, I managed to write all my sofware on the Mega ST2 and print my papers with Signum! on my 9 pin matrix printer in a quality that my PC colleagues were absolutely jealous of. As said, the advantage was then quickly lost even if I still could use my 1991 acquiered TT up until the mid 90. But by then, the PC was indeed already in another category (CD-ROM, SVGA, Soundcards, Win95 and/or NT or OS/2, beginning of Linux etc.). Our poor niches computer couldn't follow against the sheer mass of the market.
> PC's had this annoying limit up until the 90s and the complexity that it introduced was mind blowing (EMM, EMS, XMS etc.).
Competent enough people on both ends, end-users and programmers alike, simply worked around that. In the end, it still allowed for a platform of industry-leading applications and games, many of them not available on Amigas or Ataris.
You very much do. It's like 3D-workstations and other pro-applications were not a competitive thing for PCs in the Eighties.
> If you were in East Germany at the time, then you wouldn’t have had an accurate view of what was happening in the industry.
You need to connect the dots for a change, friend. I only brought it up to illustrate that you Westerners had a significant headstart; the tech I and most of my peers were fumbling around with beginning in the Nineties was already, parse this slowly please, available to YOU in the Eighties! Geddit?
See, in Central Europe, the Amiga 500 came out only in May '87. In October, the US and UK followed suit. The first reliable Amiga for the pro market, the A2000, made its debut in March 1987. What does that mean? First comparison timepoints: Christmas sales 1987 as well as 1988 (these two numbers are part of what we call "the Eighties"). With the A1000 and the STs, as well as all the 8-bitters, one needs to dial back to Christmas '85 (520) and '86 (1040), not accounting for more affluent early adopters buying systems closer to the release date.
So! What is really possible at these timepoints in the PC world (e. g. 386DX, VGA, Adlib, MT-32, ...), what in the Atari- and Amiga-eco systems? What would be economically sound for what type of customer, in what markets? What software was available?
Nah, I think my point stands. As great as the Atari and Amiga home computers and pro models were, these eco-systems, as such, definitely did not have the massive advantage in "all-inclusive" capabilities that is so often ascribed to them.
> You very much do. It's like 3D-workstations and other pro-applications were not a competitive thing for PCs in the Eighties.
I never said anything about 3D workstations in the 80s.
I said 3D games were the tipping point where the envy flipped from PC->Amiga to Amiga->PC.
And that has nothing to do with personal preference.
> You need to connect the dots for a change, friend. I only brought it up to illustrate that you Westerners had a significant headstart; the tech I and most of my peers were fumbling around with beginning in the Nineties was already, parse this slowly please, available to YOU in the Eighties! Geddit?
I got your point the first time. However you keep conflating personal experience with technology.
Just because you didn’t have access to an Amiga 500 it doesn’t mean PCs were superior technology in the 80s. It just means your experience isn’t inclusive. Literally just that and nothing technical.
this is the crux of your disagreement: Just because you weren’t able to experience the competition in the 80s doesn’t mean it somehow didn’t exist.
> As great as the Atari and Amiga home computers and pro models were, these eco-systems, as such, definitely did not have the massive advantage in "all-inclusive" capabilities that is so often ascribed to them.
You’re making a strawman argument here.
We are simply comparing 80s home computers. In the 80s, PCs were several steps behind the competition. In general and against many common benchmarks and UX metrics.
We aren’t talking about $10,000 top of the line workstations against “pro” STs, we’re talking about a like-for-like in terms of home computers and price points.
PCs were much more upgradable. But then you could upgrade Amigas and STs too if you wanted. However PCs were the better option if you wanted something where you could define your own spec. Albeit this still wasn’t a common a thing until the late 80s. But I do agree that if you wanted the latest bleeding edge hardware then PCs were the way to go. However I’d wager you knew fewer people with $10,000 PCs than you knew with Amigas. ;)
———
Anyway, I think we’ve hit an impasse. You’re unwilling to accept that your experience is flawed and my unwillingness to accept your experience is fact.
So perhaps we should quit here before the conversation degrades.
> I never said anything about 3D workstations in the 80s.
Exactly my point. Your metric (for judging graphics capabilities) in this case was strictly preference (bias) about a set of games with a specific visual aesthetic from 1991/92 ("It wasn’t until the era of ray casting 2.5D 1st person shooter that PCs started looking better than their counterparts").
> Just because you didn’t have access to an Amiga 500 it doesn’t mean PCs were superior technology in the 80s. [...] this is the crux of your disagreement: Just because you weren’t able to experience the competition in the 80s doesn’t mean it somehow didn’t exist.
As I wrote, I got to experience Atari STs back in the day, albeit in a limited fashion. And this might come as a terrible shock to you, but people are also able to experience technology decades later and extrapolate accordingly. It's what historians (of science and technology for example) do all the time. Good lorde!
> We are simply comparing 80s home computers. In the 80s, PCs were several steps behind the competition.
Yes, until, by my estimation, 1987/88 (at a time a lot of dedicated PC-gaming magazines got off the ground as well). Strictly on technological grounds, i. e. on many technological but also economical metrics, as contextualized by real-world use cases across whole industries and economies in many nations.
The big deal about these home computers was indeed the "bang for the buck" mantra. This is, at least as far as I'm concerned, completely indisputable. But when evaluating whole eco systems against each other, a 386 workstation from 1987 is as much part of that equation as an Amiga 2000 workstation as XT-grade Europlastik from Schneider as an Amiga 500 or an Atari ST. That's not hard to comprehend.
> However I’d wager you knew fewer people with $10,000 PCs than you knew with Amigas. ;)
Well, the first Amiga I ever saw was an A2000 in a yearbook. And "in the flesh"? 2007, at a demoscene thing. PCs, incl. graphics workstations (such as the used one I bought from my mentor who got himself a 486 replacement)? All around me. Even at my grandma's workplace (chemical engineering) which I was often allowed to terrorize as a kidlet, already shortly before the fall of the Iron Curtain. The STs were only an outlier, computers as music instruments; their users (households) also owning/sharing PCs. Video game consoles were much more popular when it came to arcade-style gaming. But that's just in my neck of the woods; I'm well aware that the Amigas were some of the most popular, and capable, machines here in Europe, especially Germany.
> However PCs were the better option if you wanted something where you could define your own spec.
Precisely. The openness of the eco system was and is, generally speaking, both strength and weakness.
> Anyway, I think we’ve hit an impasse. You’re unwilling to accept that your experience is flawed and my unwillingness to accept your experience is fact.
My experience is, as I've internalized a long time ago, certainly limited. But then again, so is yours. :p
> Exactly my point. Your metric (for judging graphics capabilities) in this case was strictly preference (bias) about a set of games with a specific visual aesthetic from 1991/92 ("It wasn’t until the era of ray casting 2.5D 1st person shooter that PCs started looking better than their counterparts").
That’s the literal opposite of my point. I don’t think you’re actually reading my comments properly. Or if you are, you’re just reading the words and assuming I’m wrong so not really listening to the points im making.
> Yes, until, by my estimation, 1987/88 (at a time a lot of dedicated PC-gaming magazines got off the ground as well). Strictly on technological grounds, i. e. on many technological but also economical metrics, as contextualized by real-world use cases across whole industries and economies in many nations.
That’s not an unreasonable estimation. The date isn’t going to be exact and I’d probably nudge it a little later, but I don’t think you’re being unfair with that figure either.
> My experience is, as I've internalized a long time ago, certainly limited. But then again, so is yours. :p
I see you’ve forgotten the part where I mentioned how I ran a side gig as tech support ;)
In your proposition, a whole eco system's ("PCs") graphics started only to "look better" than their counterparts, based on your examples anyway, from 1991/92 onwards. Appeals to specific aesthetics, etc. (e. g. only 2D- or only 3D-capabilities) can quickly lead to fallacies of composition. As they so often do in arguments between mostly opinionated men about their favorite toys. :D
> I see you’ve forgotten the part where I mentioned how I ran a side gig as tech support ;)
You’re replying to peoples comments but you’re not even trying to understand what people have said in those comments.
Take below for example. You keep claiming that I had a preference for 3D games but I made no such statement. And in fact repeatedly try to steer the conversation back to the 80s and before 3D games were the norm on any platform.
What you’re missing is we are talking about hardware technology and you are talking about preference of games. You’re the one who’s arguing about preferences. Not us.
> In your proposition, a whole eco system's ("PCs") graphics started only to "look better" than their counterparts, based on your examples anyway, from 1991/92 onwards. Appeals to specific aesthetics, etc. (e. g. only 2D- or only 3D-capabilities) can quickly lead to fallacies of composition. As they so often do in arguments between mostly opinionated men about their favorite toys. :D
I’m usually the first to invoke the “preference isn’t the same as fact” argument, but in this instance we have impartial proof that PCs lagged behind just by virtue of the technology available at comparable price points.
When PCs were stuck with CGA, not support for scrolling, etc, they were unambiguously worse than games consoles of that era. While Atari ST and Amiga were producing graphics that exceeded what the Master System and NES could do.
The whole reason Commander Keen existed was because Carmak (I forget how his name is spelt) found a hack to produce Super Mario quality graphics on commodity IBM-compatible hardware. Something previously considered impossible to do.
The point I’m making about 2.5D games isn’t pretence either. It’s showing where PCs grew beyond the capabilities of their contemporaries. You couldn’t do ray tracing on 16 bit consoles. Frankly, it even performed like shit on most 32bit consoles too. Yet it worked really well on PCs.
What you’re talking about is games that you liked to play. What I’m talking about is the actual technical capabilities of the hardware.
And the fact that literally every single person you’ve chatted to about this has disagreed with your analysis and echoed my statements must surely demonstrate that you’re attempting to rewrite history around your own preferences for PCs.
It’s fine to like prefer PCs. Nobody would criticise you for having that preference. The comments being made here wasn’t that you can’t have a good time with PCs. It was that the technology behind the PCs was shit compared to the other 80s alternatives. And that’s something that you can easily, and everyone already has, clearly demonstrated in our posts.
I think the real crux of the problem here is that you’re too young and/or grew up in the wrong part of Europe to have really seen the difference and instead of listening to others, you’re still firmly clinging onto the belief that your opinions are infallible. Unfortunately, in this specific instance, the body of evidence is overwhelmingly stacked against you.
> You keep claiming that I had a preference for 3D games but I made no such statement.
How absurd, I made no such claim. I simply referred to something you brought up: the visual aesthetics of 2.5D raytraced games from ca. '91/'92, which was your yardstick to judge the (graphics) capabilities of competing eco systems, i. e. to determine when PC games began to "look better than their counterparts" from the homecomputer world. Which, to me, is just a generalization; a fallacy.
You either didn't read my posts properly, or are deliberately putting words in my mouth. So unless you offer up some serious numbers, detailed use cases, cultural insights, war stories, et cetera... this conversation has run its course for me. For the record, the rest of my reply is here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44273046].
> I’m usually the first to invoke the “preference isn’t the same as fact” argument, but in this instance we have impartial proof that PCs lagged behind just by virtue of the technology available at comparable price points.
The "bang for the buck"-deal relevant home computers had going for 'em was something I already acknowledged... more than once... a while ago.
> When PCs were stuck with CGA, not support for scrolling, etc, they were unambiguously worse than games consoles of that era. While Atari ST and Amiga were producing graphics that exceeded what the Master System and NES could do.
Once again, the Amiga 500 home computer came to the market only in 1987, a machine already outperformed by top-of-the-line PCs from the same year, strictly in technological terms of course. For an economical comparison one would need specific use cases and numbers, i. e. prices, accessability, and so on. The rest falls into the area of coders and users adapting to these very platforms and eco systems, and their associated culture and politics, et cetera.
> The whole reason Commander Keen existed was because [...] Something previously considered impossible to do.
Yeah, negotiating, and overcoming, specific limitations every platform had in one form or another. Also already addressed when I replied to the other chap trying to make a huge deal out of PC memory segmentation...
> What you’re talking about is games that you liked to play. What I’m talking about is the actual technical capabilities of the hardware.
Yeah, when I mention the superior technical capabilities of PCs from, say, '87/'88 onwards several times (VGA, MT-32, expandability, etc.), it's "just games I like to play"; when you talk about some 2.5D titles just "looking better than some nebulous counterparts" it's of course hardware capability. :D
As I've said, somebody needs to write a piece of satire. A sort of two-hander the likes of The Sunset Limited or My Dinner with Andre. Just for us nerdlingers.
> And the fact that literally every single person you’ve chatted to [...].
For every Atari etc. fan with an application edge-case or preference (e. g. Signum!), I can easily forward one myself.
> I think the real crux of the problem here is that you’re too young and/or grew up in the wrong part of Europe to have really seen the difference and instead of listening to others, you’re still firmly clinging onto the belief that your opinions are infallible.
As mentioned several times already as well, I saw the sign, bro, I have seen the difference. I got hands-on experience with C64s, C128s and PCs (including XT- and AT-class machines) from '89 onwards, the Atari ST from '90 onwards, and the Amiga eco-system by only reading all the relevant glossies, including back-issues, in a very dedicated fashion from '90/'91 onwards. In the latter case, hands-on experience came only much later (mostly in the form of A600s and A1200s, the faves of the retro/vintage gaming circuit), from 2007 onwards.
And that's just computers. Consoles are another matter.
If youve only used a PC in the 90s then it’s easy to see the Atari and Amiga crowd as rose-tinted fanboys. But they’re comparing 90s IBM PCs with 80s competitors.
Really, that says more about how IBM PCs were 10 years behind the competition than about how great IBM-compatibles were.
People got accustomed to whatever personal computer they used every day and many grew fond of it. After all, the power and capability of a desktop computer in the 80s was unprecedented and, for many, revelatory. That said, in the mid-to-late 80s, the PC platform was generally under-powered dollar for dollar compared to most of its leading competitors, most of which were based on Motorola 680x0 CPUs. The strength of the PC during this time was it's rapidly expanding library of business software applications and hardware expansion options in the form of add-in cards (something which Apple had with the Apple II but abandoned for a while with the Mac, the Atari ST never really had and only the "professional" series Amiga's had (A2000, A3000, A4000).
Being underpowered per dollar doesn't mean the PC couldn't be extremely useful or the best platform for a given scenario and it certainly doesn't mean there weren't hobbyists who used and loved their late 80s PCs as dearly as any other 80s personal computer owner. Of course, this power balance was largely addressed by the mid-90s - which is why the PC juggernaut then extinguished the Amiga, Atari and (very nearly) the Mac.