The one company you had to know next to nothing about computers in order to talk sense with the sales guys. But the computerland guys I knew tended to know a reasonable amount.

In those days I actually (admit to) selling Apple IIs as business machines for small business. I gave it up when I realised how easy it was for the business to lose all the data of their disks due to dirty contacts on the disk controller card.

Ended up selling what were known as SBCs - the low end models (prior to IBM/PC) where all-in-one units with 2 8in FDDs - later they included a 5 then 10mb HDD, the processor was an 8085. Ran CP/M as the OS, the brand I sold was Panasonic (Matsushita). Even went to Japan to learn about their next models (the HDD ones). We sold a lot of these machines & they were pretty good for what they did.

Ran MS's Basic for bus apps. Did word processing & simple spreadsheets, drove dot matrix printers, The 8in FDDs were the 1.2 MB versions.
(IBM's original 8in FDDs were single sided, single density with 256k store (I seem to recall one machine only having 128k but I may be wrong)).

The next machines I got involved with (1980) ran ZEUS & Xenix (ZEUS= Zilog Enhance Unix System) both based on Unix V7 with Berkley Enhancements. At the same time the 8-bit market was using MP/M then MP/M86. Then I got involved with IBM/XTs but didn't like them much because Xenix pooped all over DOS & MP/M86. And the Xenix machines were true multi-user instead of that clumsy bank-switched memory used by MP/M.

Still have fond memories of the era.

Cheers Doug M