"OS/2 finally came out in late 1987, priced at $340, plus $2,000 for additional memory to run it. By then, Windows had been on the market for two years and was proving hugely popular."
No. Windows was basically irrelevant until 3.0 came out in 1990.
No. Windows was basically irrelevant until 3.0 came out in 1990.
Spreadsheets changed the world. We went from 1 or 2 types of tuna and 1 or 2 types of olive oil in the supermarket to dozens of each. Why? How? The big enabler was Lotus 1-2-3. Product managers in food companies could manage the ingredients, inventory, branding, marketing and sales performance of dozens of products at a time instead of just one or two. The spreadsheet was a fancy calculator, in the same way that a machine gun is a fancy pistol, and a combine harvester is a fancy hoe.
The first decade of personal computers enabled office work to scale, and it reconfigured literacy by enabling individuals to type letters when they felt like it. The fax machine was right there alongside, like the hammer and the sickle of capitalism. The resulting boost to productivity touched every industry the world over.