>The result was a firehose of applications and hardware add-ons of every sort imaginable, including some unimaginably good ones like Doom.

Huh?

Doom was developed on NeXT workstations, under the NEXTSTEP operating system. The Doom game engine was programmed in C, and the editing tools were written in Objective-C. The engine was first compiled with Intel's C compiler for DOS, but later Watcom's C/C++ compiler was used. (Wikipedia)

People were amazed at it running on the PC, and running very well.

Yes, but the appeareance of Doom on PC is not because PC was a "tinkerer's platform" as the argument in the parent post goes.

The tinkering part leading to the creation of Doom was done on NeXT.

Doom ran under a 32 bit DOS extender, which was created by tinkerers, not Microsoft.

BTW, I would also build the software on a better machine that had memory protection, get it all working correctly, then port it to DOS. That would greatly cut down on the debugging time.

> The first PC Flight Simulator was another astonishing piece of engineering.

True. I remember the feedback a WW2 vet pilot gave after testing PC FS. It went something like 'if flying on a PC got any more realistic, you'd need a pilot's license to do it.' !!

"Microsoft" Flight Simulator on the PC was actually a version of Sublogic's Flight Simulator for the Apple ][ (although it gets complicated because the classic setting of Chicago's Meigs Field was on the PC first and then backported to the Apple ][ version). But if you were impressed that the flight simulator ran on a 4.77 Mhz PC, how much more amazing that it ran on a 1 Mhz Apple ][?