Business computers first started appearing in the 1950s and by the mid-1960s they were spreading from the few pioneers into the commercial mainstream. Gradually more and more computer manufacturers developed their solutions and gained their niches in the rapidly expanding market. This the BPC era - Before Personal Computers ...

It was a decade or more before the mainframe model was challenged - partly through dumb terminals getting smarter and partly through companies like DEC developing small scale timesharing computer systems. However no one considered that the micro-processors favoured by hobbyists would become any more than a toy or at best a smart terminal on a network served by a mainframe. Both developments lead to a boom in the number of systems manufacturers and tehir competing hardware / software products. Fortunes were made and lost and staff were hired and fired as the world of data processing faced a Digital Soup ...