Complex sentence: But to get the best results out of the 8088's modest performance, many popular software applications (written specifically for the IBM PC) opted to write directly to the computer's (video) memory and peripheral chips, bypassing MS-DOS and the BIOS.
Split into simpler sentences: But to get the best results out of the 8088's modest performance, many popular software applications were written specifically for the IBM PC. The developers of these programs opted to write directly to the computer's (video) memory and peripheral chips, bypassing MS-DOS and the BIOS.