Commodore Advert - March 1981

Well, perhaps software was a bit more expensive in the early 80s, but word processing software for £3,500 (or £18,700 in 2025 terms) seems a little steep.

However, that's what the advert states - word processors for £10,000 (about £53,600) were apparently available, and compared to that, yes - you could pay less and get a PET for free.

According to Guy Kewney, writing in December 1979's Personal Computer World, the reason for this was that:

"the computer industry sells word processors to the hapless by saying that the machines can do the work of a great many typists".

However, David Butler of Butler, Cox and Partners, speaking to a group of Datapoint users, said that this was a fallacy, with secretarial costs amounting to no more than 10% of office expenses and with only 40% of a secretary's time actually devoted to typing^[1].

The suggestion, somewhat obviously, was to make equipment cheap enough so that the manager could feel happy about buying it.

Even if £3,500 wasn't considered as "cheap enough" for a word processor, it was not remotely in the same league as an American software house which at the end of 1979 released a Fortran compiler written in Pascal with a price tag of $125,000 - about £596,300!^[2]

Personal Computer World's Kewney observed drily that readers "could be forgiven for thinking that everybody in the computer industry is barmy".