28 May 2021, 18:57
I am not sure how relevant this is, but when talking about the point where the sales from clone manufacturers overtook those from IBM, by talking about proportions, it is natural to think of IBM's sales shrinking and the clone manufacturer's sales increasing but, at the beginning, I suspect this was not true at all - instead the clone manufacturers were offering a cheaper product to people who would never had bought the IBM original - they would simply not had any kind of PC. In other words they were expanding the market.
When I did work experience in 1984/1985 it was at the offices of a telco where there were IBM terminals on many of the desks, an IBM minicomputer used for software development and a whole floor IBM mainframe used for customer billing. I reckon a couple of hundred people were employed in that building. There were exactly two IBM PCs - one on the desk of the mainframe sysadmin and one in shared use for a few specialist applications that were available for the PC.
Later in 1985, joining the research division of the same telco, IBM PCs were still unusual. The general view was that they were too expensive to have one per desk and at the same time not remotely powerful enough for serious computing. Mainframes were still used for payroll, billing, customer records, fault tickets, and various other things. Unix workstations and VAX minicomputers were used for number crunching in various kinds of research and, once we had them, were also used for general purpose computing. Offices were not remotely paperless, though the research centre had an internal e-mail system based on DEC All-in-one and many of the Unix workstations had access to Internet e-mail.
My impression of when this really changed was around 1990 and, checking the Intel processor history, this was just after the introduction of 486 processor. Certainly my memory of the 386-based machines was that they were generally big and heavy, even from the clone manufacturers. The 486-based machine were smaller, lighter and, I suspect, cheaper. Very soon they were one per desk.
On the question of noise, during that five year period from 1985 to 1990 small, shared offices were the norm, i.e. with around 4-6 people in a shared space, obviously with a desk each, with the exception of senior managers who had individual offices. Open plan had not really taken off within this organisation. That came later, after the spread of the PC-clone.