The trade-off, of course, is access. Now, computers are cheap and available everywhere. In the COBOL era, what percentage of a family's income would it take to

The trade-off, of course, is access. Now, computers are cheap and available everywhere. In the COBOL era, what percentage of a family's income would it take to purchase such a machine? How wide-spread were these machines in non-English speaking areas? How easily could a program from one of the machines be used on a machine built by a different vendor? Were said programs resilient to malicious actors? As always, there are sacrifices, but in general I think we have made rational trade-offs in this realm.