I always thought that if the same amount of engineering and investment that went into overcoming the 8088 architecture instead was redirected into a more sane CPU architecture, development of the PC industry would have been accelerated by about a decade.<p>I'm talking products like QEMM, Sidekick (and the whole "terminate and stay resident" industry), expanded vs. extended memory, and other massive engineering efforts by major software (Lotus, Ventura Publisher, etc.). Time spent overcoming the limitations of the 640K barrier, segmented memory, and similar design challenges could have been spent in more productive ways, as could be seen in the development of other ecosystems on a comparative shoestring budget.<p>Granted I was an Amiga aficionado back in the late '80s/early 90's, so I'm comparing things like the ATI VGA Wonder (1988) to the Video Toaster (1990), or early efforts at GUIs (like GEM) to the multitasking OS of Amiga. But still, I think the point stands.