You are absolutely right! I had to fight right up to the CEO
of a major Corporation to purchase one of the early Toshiba Laptops in 81-82 for $6000.00! I got it, but pi**ED of the IT VICE PRESIDENT royally! Then the flood gates opened wide!
This was a beautiful system well ahead of its time. The CPU was the Intel 8085 microprocessor. Memory was IIRC may have been 128K instead of the usual 64K RAM. Storage was two 8 inch FDD (Floppy Disk Drives) or On 8 inch FDD and one 8 inch HDD (Hard Disk Drive). The most remarkable aspect of this system was its video display monitor (VDM), which was a grey scale paper white background full page monitor in portrait orientation. The input system did not use a mouse. Instead the keyboard had a circular depression at the right end of the keyboard with a grey rubber bowl which was called a Cat. To move the cursor on the screen, you moved your finger in contact with the rubberized bowl. Output was printed to a Xerox/Diablo 630 daisywheel printer, whose chracter sets were changed on the printer by exchanging daisywheels and onscreen by control codes. Managers could then expand the functionality afterwards from a word processing system to a general microcomputer by purchasing additional software, such as the SORCIM Supercalc spreadsheet application software. Since the IT Department was not alerted to the later purchase of the software, they typically remained unaware or turned a blind eye to the use of the supposed word processor into a standalone general purpose microcomputer.
It was about this time 1981-1982 that the Xerox 8010 STAR system was introduced featuring a complete office automation solution. It featured more advanced paper white monitors with fonts (digital typefaces), laser printers (xerographic), CAT and Mouse, and an array of software producing the early forms of desktop publishing technology later incorporated in the Apple Macintosh computers. It was a hard sell for us, with the basic systems including a laser printer costing $50,000 and more. Nine years later the 300dpi resolution Apple Laserwriter printer was dsicounting for $6,000.
Then there was the Fortune 50 corporation IT vice president who vetoed the purchase of an Ethernet LAN and network operating system on the claim that only Token Ring networks would survive the next few years, and Ethernet was doomed! Two years later the VP was retired/laid-off and his multi-million dollar IBM mainframes with some still in their shipping crates were being pushed out of an upper story window of the skyscraper into the backend of a garbage truck to be hauled off for recycling. An accounting application for a multitude of subsidiary companies were moved from those mainframes to a personal computer when the merged company's mainframe accounting software proved to be incapable of handling joint venture accounting transactions. Throughput improved!