[TheOtherHobbes]

I was horrified by the IBM PC. It was clearly a POS cut-down design being sold at an insanely inflated price, hidden behind an entirely fake base price invented for marketing only. The keyboard was good, but the rest of the spec was insulting, and a clear step back from the state of the art S-100 systems and the Apple II which were already handling colour and (for S-100) networking and limited multitasking.

The Amiga came later, and always looked like something from ten years in the future. It genuinely had a mid-90s aesthetic and promise in the late 80s.

The PC and Windows were both triumphs of worse-is-better corporate mediocrity and mass marketing over creative engineering.

It wasn't until the 486 multimedia clones arrived that prices became more reasonable and the hardware started to look competitive. But DOS and Windows always remained poor-to-mediocre - buggy, unreliable, messy, not secure, bizarrely user hostile - apart from a brief period downwind of NT when Windows was tolerable.

[SoftTalker]

If you really want to compare it to something from the future, in the (very) late 1980s we already had NeXTSTEP.