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> Most businesses didn't have one at all, most homes certainly didn't

I think this is wrong. The PC industry had been through a massive stock market boom in the early 80's, and "desktop publishing" was a real thing, not just for early adopters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_publishing

There was also a TV show on public television:

https://archive.org/details/Computer_Chronicles

why would they do that if it was such a niche?

As for OS/2, Gates stabbed IBM in the back by pushing Windows, as is well documented. He continued to give lip service to OS/2, but anyone with eyes could see that Microsoft's heart was with Windows.

> I'd argue that we're absolutely in the future that OS/2 envisaged

Everyone had the same "vision" back then. Actually bringing it to market is something else again.



Computers had made large inroads in many different businesses. Newspapers all were done on computers because desktop publishing was so obviously better than the manual processes. Finance and the like were also computers. Scheduling was done on computers (thus the doctor's office had them for the staff but the doctor had not clue how to run them). Most word processing was on a computer, so low level staff had them - but the executives worked with hard copies and never touched the computer.

Nothing was on the internet. So even though airlines did scheduling on a computer you needed to call a travel agent to get tickets as you didn't have access to schedule flights yourself. Even if you got access, there was no usability so you couldn't figure out how to do this without a week training.

You might have had email, but the messages from the CEO was sent out via hard copy as not everyone in the company had it.

When I started as an intern in the mid 1990s everyone was excited that we had a new system and now you could schedule your own meetings instead of asking a secretary to do this. This was at a computer company where the people wanting a meeting spent hours every day staring at a terminal, and had access to the scheduling system - but the system was so complex they couldn't figure out how to use it.

The above is office jobs. There are a lot of non-office jobs that now have computers. When I had my garage door fixed the tech pulled out a tablet to sign off and pay for the work when done. Even 10 years ago this would have been handled by paper.

In conclusion: computers had a lumpy start. I think that it is fair to say most businesses didn't have one. However many of them did. They were expensive, but affordable.


A nuanced reply.

If you look at standard adoption curves: computers were at least Early Mainstream. Well beyond Early Adopter.




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