. I don't recall seeing micros (Apple, CP/M) or minis (like the PDP-8) in small businesses. Of course that might have been due to my limitted exposure at that period. See below when I started seeing the PC show up.
BTW, companies like newspapers and large manufacturing (smelting, chemical, pharmaceuticals) had minis and mainframes for a long time. I know that PDP-8s (and DECNet) were being used in automation control until 2005.
I worked in the newspaper industry in 1984 and I know that the industry used the minis (PDP-8) for control of the presses and distribution of the stories and editing. I know this because I watch a tech do a repair of a PDP-8 where the entire back was one color of wire (Yellow). And I couldn't see anything other that wirewrap back there.
I watched one network engineer at Hoechst Celanese login to a mainframe and proceed to pipe commands from the mainframe to the the PDP (Decnet) to Unix (IP network), like you would in shell. (1988)
I also recall the first PCs being used at the Wall Street Journal. They wanted the company I worked for to create news story editing software (doesn't use ASCII & had special font and formatting). We'd been using OS/9 on a Gimix Ghost and I found the fact that the PC couldn't do multitasking a step backward. (1985). The company I worked for had OS/9, OSK and Flex machines.
In 1987 I worked at AT&T's technical support hotline in networking. I supported everything from mainframe protocols, X.25, Novell, Banyon Vines, IP and this new fangled brouter ( ;-) ). Businesses were really putting the PC to use heavily by then.
One more odd story. I recall that my insurance agent had a printer and mainframe terminal when I got my first insurance (1979). It wasn't a nasty IBM terminal but something else. He had converted his garage into his insurance office. Opinion: the introduction of the IBM PC. More specifically the beginning of the clone market. The Ken Gordon Production (PC-fests) shows started around 1982 (probably a bit later).
Some may argue that it was Apple that started the march towards business, I always considered them more educational. The name IBM meant business and the clone was close enough for everyday use. I do recall business application for the Apple, Commodore and Atari home computers. I had a copy of Visicalc and was shocked at how easy it was to use and wondered why I needed it.
In 1981 I had started working for Middelsex County College. Doing PC installation, support and repair (later mainframe terminal repair).
I recall the Apple IIs not getting noticed by the business dept. They had mainframe terminal access. But when the PC arrived then we noticed an uptick on PCs on the desk (Lotus 123 was huge).
BTW, don't trust the years I may be off on some of this. The general gist of the story is correct but I didn't really track the years. Heck I didn't get a PC clone until 1990.
I guess pet of it depends on what you consider "small business." You mention newspapers, Wall Street journal, at&t, college.....these are not small businesses (I know you know this and you were not say n they were) My family business (20-40 employees depending on time of year) started using an apple II to do the bank accounts and basic word processing (to mail letters!!) and bookkeeping in 1979/1980. I was not in high school yet using MoneyStreet to do the checking account reconciliations for the accountants (mr Forman and his son mark!) Ritchie potters electronics (for decades sold the decanavigators, the A-loran then c-loran and the radars and radios etc to the fishing boats all along the jersey coast) was the first place I saw an apple II. He started using it to do his books and print receipts. A few years later he became a full fledged Apple computer dealer!! I remember the mid 80s the dry cleaners my mom took us to had an at&t machine and. A daisywheel printer doing the two part carbon receipts. By the time I was 14 (1982) I had two other friends besides myself who's family business used the apple II to "run" their business (from daily records to just checkbooks) The local newspapers to me (coast star, etc) used some early pc for bookkeeping before they eventually switched to Macs for pagelayout in the 1986-1988 timeframe. I think the Commodores and trs 80s and apples didn't really break into the "big" business market. The small and home business market was created by those three (and VisiCalc....it was EVERYWHERE and one of the few things non computer people even knew about) and eventually taken over by the pc and clones. At least in my neck o the woods thats what I saw growing up. Tony