Widespread use of electric typewriters
ok, nominal 158 was nominally one mip machine based on various kinds of avg. workload mixes and avg. measure cache hit-miss...
however, the 370 two-processor afinity was not because of non-uniform memory access ... afinity was oriented towards 1) cache hit consistency ... constantly swtiching from one processor to another, could play havoc with cache...
I don't think daisy-wheel made Selectrics obsolete, but it did seem to penetrate more.
The Selectrics were expensive, and I buttume there was a patent on the ball and mechanism so others couldn't cheaply duplicate the system. When daisy-wheels came along, they provided speed (relatively speaking) and the ability to change fonts, just like the Selectrics, but they were for the rest of us.
My second printer, bought in 1984 and a necessity because the $500 dot matrix printer I bought in the fall of 1982 couldn't even come close to near letter quality printout (it lacked descenders, at the very least, but when I bought it it was a low end printer), it was a Smith Corona and had a daisy wheel. It too was a low end printer and only cost $399 here in Canada.
I think the fact that small computers came along impacted on the propagation of the daisy wheel. As typewriters, the ability to change fonts wasn't so important to the average person, so they could live with the traditional style electric typewriter. When small computers came along, people needed printers, and they needed printout that looked like a typewriter. So I'd guess that boosted the role of the daisy wheel.
Michael
Performance and Capacity Planning 730
Alt Folklore Computers from Newsgroups