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].

[picture: Equinox_wp_prac_mar81.webp|A similar advert from Equinox for a word-processing system, also with a "free" microcomputer, but without a printer, all for £1,995 - or about [[1995|1981]] in [[now]]. It was built for Equinox by Industrial Microsystems, and was otherwise a standard Z80A system on an S-100 bus. From PRAC, March 1981]

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".

