ok, sorry for the brief break ... in 1980 Wang was chewing up the minicomputer office market with several machines that had the premier word processing system in use in most large offices, especially the legal office market. Selectric typewriters had for a decade been the machine of choice, as it's bail lock keyboard had THE TOUCH for speed typists, as you quickly learned not to bottom keys, but release on fall thru greatly reducing finger shock by not having to bottom keys or take the recoil from the key hitting paper in your finger tips. The problem was that these typewriters were expensive to buy, and due to high maintence from the rotate tapes and complex timing they were much more complex than the standard Royal or other common typewriter. Plus, they were multi-pitch and multi-font adding a new look to business communications.
Enter word processing, daisy wheel printers, and electronic document storage and editing, and Wang had a gold mine, for about the cost of a high end selectric. IBM decided it had to compete in this new market, and in the summer of 1980 release the Display Writer, a computer based document system using the 8086 at a cost of about $8K for a single station, and about $26K in the 3 station version. The story was that IBM traded Intel bubble memory patents for the rights to the 8086 so IBM could mfg it's own processor chips. During that same spring another group in IBM was working on the PC, and decided to use the same processor design, that they already had rights too. So the Z8000, which wasn't stable yet, really was never a contender ... nor the M68K which wouldn't be stable for another year or so.
At this same time, high quality glass terminals, like the Datamedia DT80, were roughly $2K list, and low end glass terminals like the ADM-3A where just under a grand list. Similar prices for fully configured Radio Shack TRS-80 systems, especially the TRS80 Model 2 which was the high end machine.
IBM releases the PC priced at just under $2K with dual floppies, with PCDOS and inside a few months all the large Z80 programs are being ported to the PC ... especially several key word processing applications, which combined with a high end daisy wheel printer, creates an affordable word processing solution at about the same price as a good Selectric ... and a much cheaper maintence contract.
IBM killed two cash cows ... the selectric typewriter and the Displaywriter without realizing what they had done. IBM sales was giving away PC's with a huge institutional discount at just above ADM-3A prices, which combined with 3270 emulation software, also destroyed IBM's mainframe terminal business. By perchasing PC's in volume, institutional and other large buyers, were able to ratchet down IBM's multi-tiered pricing to get huge discount on IBM minicomputer and mainframe products. As a result, thousands of PC's sat every where, unopened, just to get huge prices savings on big ticket purchases. This lead to discount grey market channels for PC's, and even lowered the street price to accellerate the comdity PC word processing market.
Replacing over a decade of selectric typewriters, and several years of high end Z80 business computers, with 16 bit processors took about 18 months during 1982 and early 1983, and then the market saturated. The first huge computer tech buble ended with the tech crash in 1983. That further fuelled depressed computer prices as a huge over production inventory was liquidated at fire sale prices.
With the market very flat, depressed sales, depressed prices, it took the industry the next two years to retool, reengineer, and come out of that down turn with much better products that took another 5 years to saturate the market as demand for word processing, business computers, and home computers really became mainstream.