Yep.. I had an original IBM PC when they first came out. My setup was pushing $5500 all in with a dot matrix printer, and X-Y plotter.
Actually though, the plotter above was not a new purchase and was shifted from the first desktop I used, a Hewlett Packard 9825. The HP9825 was something like a $20K investment (computer upgrades, thermal printer, floppy drive, X-Y plotter) or better put, the company had that much invested in it. I rescued the HP9825 from a dusty corner after it was replaced by a HP9845 as the brains for a HP GC-MS laboratory analyzer. Zero off the shelf programs for it so another engineer and I wrote custom programs for our number crunching needs.
Initially when the IBM PC came out, the company IT group wouldn't let us switch to the IBM. IT’s position is that we needed to switch to the mainframe network, which used VT-100 terminals, for statistics and modeling and quit fooling around with the desktop toys. A friendly competition was arranged. We took a typical data package from pilot plant runs and then ran a time trial on how long it took to input raw data in the computer, set up the software to analyze the data then print out the results. The HP9825 with our custom software completed the time trial plus plotted out multiple regression analysis before the mainframe’s data entry was even complete. I had one of the company's first IBM PCs a month or two later and within a year or two the company had a thousand or two.
One last thought comes to mind - This is opinion and YMMV... Back in this time frame, we didn't buy ready made programs for a task but wrote them. A different world. The IBM PC changed the game as commercial software started dribbling out. Apologies' to Apple and Commodore geeks but that's the was it was. The best executions were not by the major industry players but stuff from the garage programmers. Lotus 123 for spreadsheet overtaken by Quatro Pro (tabs!), which was copied for the UI of MS Excel. Word Perfect for power users copied by IBM Display Write, Volkswriter for the mass of users and again the UI of MS Word copied these to create the UI for MS Word. SAS capability for statistics incorporated into spreadsheet functions and more powerful stand alone programs such as Minitec. Pimavera horsepower for project management replicated into easier to use MS Project and Primavera’s own stand alone core SureTrack (superior to MS Project even in Project's contemporary form). Microsoft has been wildly successful in taking advantage of other's trend setting to polish and integrate others trailblazing into core business and technical software.
Quite a testimony for the IBM PC. Can you tell me what year your company bought a thousand or two of them? 1983?
I purchased my first brand new Wintel post college in 1994, paid 1,700 or something like that for a 386-SX with a 15” CRT if memory served...
Thought it was overpriced then, and it was one of the cheapest systems I could find at the time that could do what I needed it to do.
I recall that back in the early 80s, an executive was home sick and getting antsy, not being able to do his work. It was driving him crazy, having nothing to do except watch gameshows and soap operas. So he decided to try and do some of his office work on his kid's Commodore 64 using a word processor called SpeedScript. He was typing letters and some reports and he realized it seemed to be going faster than his work at the office on WordPerfect, especially on things like search and replace, and moving things around.
Curious to see if he was right, he called his secretary and they did some timing checks on duplicate documents. The C=64 turned out to be FASTER, sometimes up to ten times faster than Wordperfect on almost every word processing function than her office IBM-PC. . . except for saving and retrieving documents (the Commodore 1541 floppy drive was notoriously slow compared to other disk drives, but you didn't get many disk errors because it had its own 6502 computer built in to monitor read/writes).
One of the most eye opening to him was when they created a document that had just the same word repeated 400 times and then did a search and replace of that word with another. The C=64 was done with that task in under five seconds while WordPerfect took something like fifty seconds, IIRC.
Printing was the same between both computers. . . but they were limited by the printers. They were both printing at 80 or 120 characters per second on daisy wheel printers, I don't recall which. (Remember those clattering days?)
When they were discussing this in the magazine where it was written up (PC World?), I wrote to point out the obvious explanation, and others came to the same conclusion. The 1.023MHz C=64 did everything in RAM, while the 4.77 IBM-PC was much more of a DISK OPERATING SYSTEM. . . and the other fact that SpeedScript was monolithic program that was only 39K in size. (I ought to know, I typed the whole thing into my C=64 in machine code!). WordPerfect, for that day and age, was huge, probably 10 times the size of SpeedScript. It simply took longer to go through everything it had to do for every command. . . and it had to go through TEN TIMES THE MEMORY, even though the clock speed was faster.
Also Wordperfect's file sizes were much more than ten times the sizes of the text files the SpeedScript was using. . . and even though the PC was about 4.5 times faster than the C=64, it was having to wade through ten times more memory and probably twenty times larger files of a lot of text plus formatting dross to do the same job. Sometimes the simple and lean can beat the complicated and fat.