In that late 80s period Terence is writing about - I was part of Oracle and had email on my DEC terminal for communicating with others in the company around the world. Just gnashing my teeth over why people outside the company couldn’t see the benefit.
Probably because they understood that …
a single computer terminal was likely to set you back around £3,000 - and that’s before you take into account message transmission costs.
… better than I did
When Oracle moved me to California - I even had one of those terminals at home.
Of course - come the PC and laptop revolution they were so slow in adoption it was hard to understand that it was the same company.
It was kind of like how use of mobiles in geographies with bad landline coverage resulted in exponentially faster adoption