[TUHS] Why did PDPs become so popular?

I apologise if this is too far from the main topic, but I wanted to check an urban legend. There is a story - as I have heard it told - that PDPs established their place (and popularity) in the marketplace by pointedly *not* advertising themselves as "computers", but instead as "programmed data processors". This was because - so the story goes - that everyone in corporations of the time simply *knew* that "computers" came only from IBM, lived in big datacentres, had million-dollar price-tags, and required extensive project management to purchase; whereas nobody cared enough about a thing called a "programmed data processor" to bother bikeshedding the few-tens-or-hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars purchase proposal to an inevitable death. Thus, they flitted under the purchasing radar, and sold like hotcakes. I wonder: does this story have substance, please? Aside from anything else: I draw parallels to the adoption of Linux by Wall St, and the subsequent adoption of virtualisation / AWS by business - now reflected in companies explaining to ISO27001 auditors that "well, we don't actually possess any physical servers..." - alec -- http://dropsafe.crypticide.com/aboutalecm