On 2024-04-27 2:39 p.m., Wayne S via cctalk wrote:
When you say “software drove hardware sales” do you mean complete software application systems or do you mean compilers available for the hardware so the software teams had variety in what they could program? Up to the ‘90’s, companies had big, expensive hardware and little to no canned software applications so companies also had relatively cheaper software developers to make custom programs. Sent from my iPhone
Well I know of some systems where software sure helped with hardware sales and that is with the IBM System/34 and System/36 and perhaps even the System/32 before them. The basic hardware in all three was similar S/32 was single user with 64K of memory and a 10MB disk S/34 added multi-user as well as more memory and storage and S/36 was an improved S/34 with more speed and memory still more storage and a very user friendly OS, but the big selling point was the very wide variety of software available including very customizable business packages such as MAPICS and BPCS. The hardware in these systems was to put it mildly was unspectacular, but user friendly and available software seemed to close the deal.
By comparision, one time I took a call on a S/32, that a customer was using long after end of support. This customer also had a Data General system that was quite a bit newer, that they had purchased because it was the coolest machine at the time, but they where not using it because there was no software available for it.
Paul.
