in the 40s: george stibbitz told his bosses at bell labs:

for $50.000,- i could build a general purpose relay calculator. their response was, "who wants to spend $50.000,- just to do calculations." | july 1976, los alamos, industry pioneers gathering, datamation, sept 1976

peter rastl recalls:

Als ich Ende der siebziger Jahre gehört habe, es gibt so etwas wie E-Mail, war meine erste Reaktion: 'Was ist das für ein Blödsinn! Für so primitive Dinge wie Briefe schreiben verwendet man diese teuren Großrechenanlagen?' | rastl

To simplify what is really a very complex story, every manufacturer was faced with the same business decision: either to stay in computers for the long-haul and accept heavy short-term losses; or to sell out while the going was good. One by one the different companies made their decisions,, so that the merger wave of 1960-63 left just three UK computer manufacturers - ICT, English Electric and Elliott-Automation.

But this was not the end of the consolidation by any means, for in April 1964 the whole economic basis of the industry was transformed by the announcement of the IBM System/360 range of third-generation computers. It was estimated that the R&D spend for System/360 was of the order of $5 billion. At this point, all the mainframe manufacturers world-wide were forced into announcing computer ranges of comparable performance. | computer resurrection, vol1 #1, may 1990

vintage computer festival 10.0 (take this 2.0chaps) restored and introduced by severo ornstein, nov 3-4th - if you are living in that area ...