Buy a wordprocessor for under £3,500 - and get a microcomputer for free Well, perhaps software was a bit more expensive in the early 80s, but word processing software for £3,500 (or [[3500|1981]] in [[now]] terms) seems a little steep. However, that's what the advert states - word processors for £10,000 (about [[10000|1981]]) 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 PCW, 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[source: "Proper price persuasion", Personal Computer World, December 1979, p. 33-34]. 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 [[83000|1979]]![source: "Proper price persuasion", Personal Computer World, December 1979, p. 34] PCW's Kewney observed drily that readers "could be forgiven for thinking that everybody in the computer industry is barmy".