Very little is going to prevent this thing from being very slow. It’s an 8088 running 4.77Mhz, on a not really great system architecture. Head to head the orig

Very little is going to prevent this thing from being very slow. It’s an 8088 running 4.77Mhz, on a not really great system architecture. Head to head the original PC was slower than competing Z80s at 4Mhz. The truly singular advancement the 8088 brought was more precious, precious memory. The PC itself was a different phenomenon. What it lacked in performance it made up for in many other ways. For most applications, particularly early on, the 8087 did not bring a lot to the table to improve performance. GW-BASIC did not recognize it, for example. Wasn’t going to make Wordstar any faster. And it was an expensive add-on. Numeric coprocessors we’re always pretty niche until they came bundled with the 486 and 68040, even then the 486SX and 68LC040 continued to sell, and did not have bundled FPUs.