I worked at Intel Corp and there were many assessments and mitigations made, including some fixes. It was certainly a non-zero effort!

could support up to 640kB of RAM

Oh, that’s right! It was expandable to that amount, but not necessarily out of the box to that amount. I forgot about that!

That reminds me of an old joke:

The three biggest lies:

• “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.”
• “Of course, I’ll respect you in the morning.”
• “This machine is 100% IBM compatible.”

One thing that I remember on clones was a timing switch. The IBM PC was slower than the clones, and games often didn’t run as expected unless you slowed down the processor.

The Apple II was biggest software/installed base, the Atari 800 had the best graphics, CP/M machines had established business software already.

My impressions: Apple II and Commodore weren’t really after the business market. CP/M machines were although I only knew of one guy that owned one (and he ran a BBS of all things from it). Those interested in Apple or Commodore and Atari were probably not trying to run a business of a lot of size. Don’t forget the Tandy TRS-80 stuff too.

That was my first one as well.

My first PC modem was the US Robotics Sportster 14400 FAX Modem. A cool feature was that you could flip a couple of bits and it would do 19200. USR reportedly grumbled about that breaking the warranty and using it against its design limits, but it worked great.

Absolutely. I drooled over several issues of that magazine! Good memories!