🚀 go-pugleaf

On 3/26/2018 4:31 PM, Andreas Kohlbach wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Mar 2018 01:16:35 -0500, Dave Garland wrote:
>>
>> 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.)
> 
> You could buy an Apple 2 or TRS-80 before the Osborne. They didn't come
> with much software other than the OS and may be a game or two. But no
> business software.

True, and that's where Visicalc was born. And suddenly small business 
people began buying Apples because they wanted that spreadsheet.

> 
>> Osborne's marketing gimmick was, "everything you need except a printer
>> is in the box, you don't need to know anything about computers".
> 
> Not sure about "you don't need to know anything about computers". That
> was probably more what the Coleco Adam and the Amstrad PCW advertised.
> 

Just a lesson not to trust claims made by marketers. (I don't recall 
if Osborne claimed that explicitly, but it was certainly implied.)  I 
made my business filling that gap. The buyers were usually "appliance 
operators", they weren't interested in computers per se, but it did 
something they found useful, and that was generally the spreadsheet or 
the word processing. For a number of years, the owner of that original 
Osborne had me come and erase files for him. He didn't know how, he 
didn't want to know how, if he could tweak his spreadsheets and write 
rough drafts to hand hard copy to a typist, that was all he was 
interested in.