🚀 go-pugleaf

On 3/25/2018 4:50 PM, Andreas Kohlbach wrote:

> What is with the Osborne and the office software coming along with it?
> Since WordStar and other could run on any Z80 (8080) I assume that at
> least small businesses used it a lot.
> 
If you're asking why buy a computer with bundled software instead of 
just buying the software for the computer you already had, mostly the 
buyer didn't have a computer already. At least not one available to 
the buyer. (At my PPOE, accounting had just bought a mini, but that 
was only for accounting and nobody else touched it, including the 
boss.) Osborne's marketing gimmick was, "everything you need except a 
printer is in the box, you don't need to know anything about 
computers". Buying software retail wasn't cheap. The original price 
for WordStar was $495 plus $40 for the printed manual; Visicalc 
(similar to the SuperCalc spreadsheet bundled with Osbornes) was 
around $100; I can't find a price for MBASIC (CP/M computers mostly 
did not have BASIC in ROM). But Osborne's price at $1795 included all 
that, and even better it was already configured to go with the 
hardware. CP/M hardware was not standardized except for the CPU chip, 
you couldn't just buy software and load it in, because every company 
used a different format for floppies. (I had a program named UniForm, 
that could read/write/format around 100 different formats, but that 
was only for soft-sectored disks, not for drives where the floppies 
were hard-sectored.) And even if you could read the disks, it probably 
wouldn't work well without telling it things like the escape sequences 
to move the cursor on the screen, do a highlight, etc. Bundling turned 
out to be a very successful marketing strategy, and was copied by the 
competition (other stand-alone single-board CP/M computers like Kaypro 
and Morrow). (Prices in 1983-ish dollars, multiply by 2.5 for today's 
dollars.)