Why were word processors $500+ in 1980s (~$1300 2021)? Aside from "seemed right" the packaging and contents were expensive. Here's a leading WP MultiMate. It came with several books, reference cards, keyboard templates, backup disks... The box is a fancy cloth storage box. 1/

2/ Companies were not just teaching their product but had to explain how a PC worked. The "Beginner's Guide" literally explained how a PC worked? Why, because often people were buying a PC to run one software product. How do floppies work?

3/ Products were enormously complex to use. It often took weeks to become kind of proficient. Mostly because usage meant learning essentially arbitrary keyboard "chords". MultiMate was famous for *stickers* you'd put on your keys (talk about commitment). (tough to find these!)

4/ Aside from MS-DOS/Mac only running one program at a time, most PCs only ran one program. I set up original PCs that put 123.exe or wp.exe in AUTOEXEC.BAT because the computer was *either* for word processing or spreadsheet (or quicken in the home).

5/5 But still compare that cost with today's SaaS for productivity tools and you can see that while the period from about 1995-2020 was ever increasing value for lower cost (bytes/$), SaaS actually increased the TAM for these tools (same with Salesforce, Photoshop, etc.)

PS/ MultiMate (no dev relation to MS MultiPlan) rooted in insurance industry (used mainframes extensively). Mainframes used keyboards with color coded keys and labels like PF1, JMP, CLR used in arcane combos. It was natural for early PC s/w to inherit that "ease of use". // END