The Japanese and IBM are poised to jump into a fast-growing new market
Ater the tragic MGM Grand Hotel fire in Las Vegas last November, rescue workers were faced with a daunting task: how to keep track of the 4,500 guests and employees at the disaster scene. Nervous relatives and friends quickly overwhelmed the police department with calls seeking information about missing people. Executives of Commodore International Ltd., who were attending a convention in the city, moved seven of their small PET machines into disaster headquarters at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Commodore personnel programmed the computers to list names and rooms of the people staying at the hotel and drew up injury and death lists, helping police to end the confusion.
Introduced in 1974, personal computers, which look like portable TV sets with keyboards, have advanced from being toys for electronic tinkerers to important tools in small businesses, schools and an increasing number of homes. Sales are growing so rapidly that personal computers are the leading product in the explosive field of electronic calculating and information equipment. Says Benjamin Rosen, the editor of a computer industry newsletter: "The under $10,000 sector of the market is going to be one of the great growth industries of the 1980s."
Sales of small computers are increasing at a rate of 50% to 60% a year. More than 1 million have already been bought, at prices ranging from $500 to $10,000. By 1985 small computers are expected to be a $9 billion-a-year business, according to California-based Vantage Research Inc.
Users of small computers have found that the machines can perform nearly all the functions of their bigger brothers, the refrigerator-size minicomputers and the mainframe models that occupy whole rooms. In San Francisco, President Fritz Maytag of Anchor Brewing Co. uses the Apple II machine on his desk to plot his company's financial future. The United American Bank of Knoxville, Tenn., has sold Tandy computers to 115 customers, who pay bills and check statements and balances at home on the machines. Bruce Kemp, an executive with Merrill Lynch in New York City, does stock analysis on his Apple II in his den. When he is not at the keyboard, his son Michael, 10, and daughter Nell, 6, use the machine to play computer games like Space Invaders.
Experts have long predicted that personal computers would be a great new market, but sales were hindered because the equipment was too complicated for most people. Now manufacturers have started marketing products that are both cheaper and less technically complex. In the jargon of the business, computers have become "user friendly."
Although computer buffs dream of the day when home computers will print movie tickets or order the groceries, such applications are still uncommon. The vast majority of personal computers are being bought by small businessmen, doctors and lawyers, who use them for prosaic things like record keeping, billing and checking inventories.
In 1981 about 75% of the personal computer industry's estimated $1 billion in sales will be controlled by just three companies. They are: