OT: Who deserves the credit for the rapid growth in graphical computing?

[Jose Lerebours]

On 01/24/2017 03:50 PM, Bruce Easton via Filepro-list wrote:
> When I was a contractor at Sun Micro in the late 90s, many of the 
> supervisors I talked to seem to have backgrounds at either IBM or HP. 
> Of course no surprise there - they all had a presence in the valley at 
> the time.  In the mid 80s I was working at a secretarial school and 
> they had a number of those IBM Displaywriters.  I was just looking but 
> couldn't find an image of the model they had - it had a portrait 
> display - I've never seen them before then nor since.  I didn't 
> realize till now how expensive those dedicated WPs were.  The wiki 
> page says about almost 8 grand each.  The school also had a Wang 
> dedicated WP that sat in the corner.  No one could figure out how to 
> boot it up - but it looked nice to potential students. 
lol - I was blown away when I saw my first electric type writer (IBM).  
I thought they were so cool that I signed up for the "type writing" 
class in HS.  I was the only guy in the class and boy, the guys were 
relentless on me ...

$8K a piece - What can we get with $8K today?  When I first heard of 
numbers like that in the software business was while working on a 
filePro application for the flooring industry.  The package sold for 
about $20K including the OS (XENIX), the server (Edge PC), 10MB hard 
drive and about 4 wyse 60 terminals.

If you had multiple locations and wanted to include a multiplexer, modem 
and possibly a dedicated line you were talking big bucks - Those days 
software was such a "commodity" that banks would lease them (finance the 
purchase of the software), I do not think they do that any more.

-- 
Jose D. Lerebours
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