> On Apr 27, 2024, at 1:15 PM, Tarek Hoteit via cctalk <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> I came across this paragraph from the July 1981 Popular Science magazine
> edition in the article titled “Compute power - pro models at almost home-unit
> prices.”
>
> “ ‘Personal-computer buffs may buy a machine, bring it home, and then spend
> the rest of their time looking for things it can do’, said …. ‘In business,
> it’s the other way around. Here you know the job, you have to find a machine
> that will do it. More precisely, you have to find software that will do the
> job. Finding a computer to use the software you’ve selected becomes
> secondary.”.
>
> Do you guys* think that software drove hardware sales rather than the other
> way around for businesses in the early days? I recall that computer hardware
> salespeople would be knocking on businesses office doors rather than software
> salesmen. Just seeking your opinion now that we are far ahead from 1981.
Not PCs, but the first systems I worked on for DEC were turnkey PDP-11 based
systems for newspaper production. Clearly the customer wanted to publish
newspapers, and the hardware involved wasn't what drove the decision. A lot of
our competitors were specialized companies concentrating on that particular
business, not computer makers. For example, arguably the top company at the
time (Atex, if I remember right) also used PDP-11s. That was around 1978.
Also about that time, I worked with some people running a computer store in the
LA area ("Rainbow Computing") on a proposal for a business application. That
was a work scheduling and routing system for hospitals, and there too the point
of it was the application needed to solve the business problem, not the
hardware on which it would run.
paul
