27 Apr
2024
27 Apr
'24
8:29 p.m.
On Apr 27, 2024, at 1:15 PM, Tarek Hoteit via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> 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