On Mon, Nov 20, 2017 at 10:48:04AM -0500, Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
What I'm saying, is that there was a substantial and significant "business market" served by early microcomputers. Thus, they supported mainframe computer languages of the day: FORTRAN and COBOL. BASIC has its own history, both as a microcomputing language, and as a language used on timesharing mainframe systems.
But over time, microcomputing for business was done with interactive applications - spreadsheets, database products, word-processing. Users stopped becoming their own "programmers", but everyone used a spreadsheet. In fact, it's an interesting question - when did microcomputer owners STOP becoming "programmers" and simply became end-users? (I think it's interesting....)
I recently got my Uncle to write up his PDP-8 usage which demonstrates this with the buisiness office machine though for 12 vs 8 bits. He thought the replacement was based on off the shelf packages. http://www.pdp8online.com/memories/john_pdp8.shtml Trying to collect more first hand stories. Got one more so far.