Performance of the 8088 on PC, PCjr and Tandy 1000
For context, when these machines were being sold, nobody even thought about performance in these terms.  It is only later that we are benchmarking old machines to understand the performance gaps, and if you weren&#x27;t there, you might think this was relevant at the time.<p>Generally, in the mid 80s, you needed base performance (8088&#x2F;8086) or &quot;3 times as fast&quot; performance (80286) when the AT came about.  Compaq (now HP) became the real competitor to IBM PC&#x2F;XT because the end user could understand that they ran at 8 MHz vs the PC 4.77 Mhz.  This is as much performance issues that the users would want to know.  Better performance without needing to buy an AT.  Then the clones came about, and everybody started to put a &quot;turbo&quot; button on front of the clone PC.<p>My first degree was in finance and accounting, but I fell in love with technology, so I sold PCs out of the biggest gray marketer in Seattle when the PC AT (second real computer for business) was coming out.  I have first hand knowledge of the buying behavior because I was on the front lines of computer sales, and made a ton of good money selling $2-5K computers to people walking in off the street.<p>The advent of the PC revolution was all about apps.  I&#x27;m not saying that there weren&#x27;t benchmarks, and maybe you&#x27;d find a savvy buyer that subscribed to Byte magazine, but these were far and few between.  Tandy simply didn&#x27;t have Lotus 1-2-3.  The PC Junior wasn&#x27;t a performance issue, but the term &quot;Junior&quot; just killed the thing out of the gate.  The investment in a PC was a lot of money, and you weren&#x27;t going to get a Junior, you were going to get a real PC.  (For instance, the keyboard was much more impactful than any performance thoughts.)<p>Finally, for those not around, storage was an incredible change agent.  A lot of people think an SSD in a client platform is pretty cool.  However, you cannot image the step up that a hard drive provided versus a floppy drive.  The PC Junior and Tandy had no real hard drive path.  While IBM had hard drive specific model (XT), the effort to install a hard drive in a PC was pretty small because of the accessibility.  An open architecture, which any home builder takes for granted today, was pretty revolutionary at the time, and IBM&#x27;s willingness to allow plug-ins (where they followed Woz) caused it to cremate the competition with a peripheral market.