On Sat, Apr 27, 2024 at 12:23 PM Tarek Hoteit via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > Do you guys* think that software drove hardware sales rather than the other > way around for businesses in the early days?
For medium and large multi-user systems absolutely. At least once we got out of the era where there basically was no software so as a business you bought a machine and wrote your own. Which followed the era in which the machine probably didn't come with an operating system either lol. I worked as a developer / system programmer for an HP OEM from 1980-1986 or so. Our company made what would later be called ERP systems (on the HP 3000) for companies that did warehouse distribution and retail sales, etc. and covered pretty much all aspects of the business (Inventory, Order Processing, AP/AR/GL, etc., etc.). These were the days when a medium sized company may have only owned ONE central business computer that was used for practically everything. A customer would start their acquisition process for a new system by developing an RFP laying out their requirements for software (and possibly hardware capacity, features etc.) and companies like ours would respond to these and the selection process would proceed from there. Some customers started out with hardware manufacturer preferences, or quite often working with the salespeople of a hardware vendor, because if you were selling, say, VAXes, you needed the customer to be able to solve some problem in order to complete a sale and that usually meant finding a 3rd party software company who could provide the application software. So how a particular company ended up with a particular brand of hardware could have multiple explanations, but generally nobody bought a machine without having a prerequisite software solution available. It was an endless dance between hardware vendors and software houses and the potential customers. As an OEM for HP, we (on paper) resold the HP hardware to the customer along with the software, and that got us a cut of the hardware sale as well as software and any application customization (everyone wanted the system to work THEIR way, and that's how the total functionality of the software increased over time). The sales lead times for big system sales were often months long and the implementation typically would last several months as well so you ended up having a very close relationship with the customer, people working on site for weeks or months etc. There's a lot of very interesting history surrounding all of this, and it rarely gets considered in the history of medium to large systems. The applications, how the systems were used day-to-day, and the customers themselves and their interactions with the systems they ran, all have really interesting aspects. But yes, business customers bought solutions, not VAXes, or PR1MEs, or DGs, or HP 3000s, or IBM Midrange boxes. Each platform had at least a few key applications that had been developed there (usually by 3rd parties) that were what actually sold those hardware platforms.
