Terminals connected to minicomputers--which is what I used at work through most of that period? DOS-based word processing and spreadsheets were pretty nice by comparson.
Macs? They were fine in the mid-80s although I didn't use them in school unless my group was using them for some project.
Unix workstations were getting pretty nice by the mid-90s but those weren't something for a home user.
But expectations were much lower then, computers were expected to be a thing for a 'hobbyist' to tinker with, and those who did generally did it because they loved it.
(I still don't think what were then called "PCs" running MS-DOS or (beginning in 1985) Windows were as beloved as Amiga or Commodore 64 though, Microsoft-OS PCs were for "business", and nobody really loved them).
(Macintosh was first sold in 1984, so mid-80s was the first Macintosh).
OTOH Microsoft software's operation experience was far from happy. Bugs, crashes, byzantine installation and update procedures were all the daily reality.
To say the truth, few things were significantly better. And if they were (say, VMS, which was rock solid), they were also significantly more expensive.
Commercial Unix wasn't a hugely better; I personally crashed Solaris software, and the OS proper once. Bizarre installation and update procedures applied to it equally well.
MS started having a hit after a hit to its reputation in the tech community when it started to try to do something about the internet. They tried to muck with Web technologies so as to create its own silo, not compatible with Netscape's: custom HTML and CSS, JScript vs Javascript, etc. They also started to talk trash about competition, never a good sign. Eventually they won, partly via business pressure, partly via good technology, and many a web developer cursed the MSIE5 chokehold since then, for a decade at least.
Windows 95 was a target of many techie jokes, but, to my mind, MS have done a tremendously successful rework of desktop experience and its visual language, which was and still is widely emulated as "the common standard". Writing an OS as a DOS extender was a cool hack, which allowed to launch DirectX, and make windows a prime gaming platform.
The only thing that was ever revered about them was Bill Gates, who was more loved by business schools as a case study in how to run an extremely aggressive company.