1983

Death of Dedicated Systems

But the PC/XT would have been nothing without software and there were two applications that helped make it a success, WordStar and VisiCalc and with them came the death of dedicated word processing systems.  Word processing systems of the time filled a business need replacing the typewriter as the main form of writing letters and documents, they sold well and were popular but they only did one thing, word processing.  Such systems whether from Harris, Lainer, Wang and others, they were dedicated systems using proprietary hardware from each manufacturer which, once you bought one, you were locked into to that company’s product, that cost thousands of dollars.  On the other hand, the IBM PC/XT was a general system, it would run any sort of program that people could think of and that is where WordStar and VisiCalc came into the picture.  The WordStar word processing program ran on any PC and by the end of ’83 there were several companies making IBM PC clones as they were called.  For the first time you could by a word processing program that could run on any company’s PC which were considerably less expensive than dedicated word processing systems.  

Not only that, the same PC could run VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program.  Businesses had been using financial ledger books for many years, even centuries, sheets of paper with rows and columns in which numbers were entered, tabulated, summed, averaged and manipulated. The introduction of mechanical calculators and then later electronic calculators introduced in the 70’s was a great advancement, but the VisiCalc spreadsheet on PC was revolutionary.  Introduced in 1979 on the Apple II computer, it changed hobby computers into a serious business tool. Although popular on the Apple, it was the IBM PC and later the PC/XT when it really took off selling 700,000 copies in the first six years.  

Why buy, an expensive dedicated system that did just one thing when you could buy a much cheaper system that did many things?  Dedicated systems soon faded away.

Elizabeth