Like I said, it was the opposite where I was. I had to fight tooth and nail to put PCs in every step of the way. Not only fight management but also fight the mainframe computer people that were theives in the night. We only had three CP/M programs then, Wordstar, Datastar, and spreadsheet. I’m glad to say I saw the business value from day one and pushed as hard as I could to put as many in as possible. Of course ten years later, everyone pretended they were the ones that saw the value and never tried to block buying them. This was before the IBM PC when networking was still just being talked about.
This was before the IBM PC when networking was still just being talked about.
Actually networking was alive and well…just not with IBM. IBM was late to networking.
I was working at DEC in the Mid-80’s before the IBM PC when IBM announced they had just networked 100 computers together. They were making a HUGE show of their 100 computers. We were laughing our butts off at DEC because our own internal network was well over 65,000 computers (Vax’s, PDP-11, DEC-10, and even PDP-8s). All networked together to pass files/documents and email. Some of these systems were half-way around the world. This was before the internet - just the companies own internal network.
I’m from the business side not the technical side so you are way above me on that. I’m sure there were distributive computer networks with mainframes and mini computers and work stations etc., but for normal offices, having PCs wired together in a local network had not been done yet. After the initial stand-alone PC, local networks was the next big push and development that started to open the flood gates. Our main fight was with the main frame folks and our own managers that saw them as “toys” and not business machines.