Maybe the IBM had better text resolution, at least to my eyes. Every
amber monitor I saw looked "fuzzy' to me.

Certainly had a lot to do with the video card. Something hanging off CGA
looked terrible compared to a monochrome adapter.

I seem to remember the PC I bought having 32k standard, and had them
add another 32k for maybe over a hundred bucks extra.
Later, when I had the money, I added an AST 6-pack to max the memory,
and set up a virtual drive.

Yep, 6-pack, Tecmar and other memory cards as ramdrives went a long way
towards speeding things up.