Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
History of personal computers
Summary
The history of the personal computer as a mass-market consumer electronic device began with the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s. A personal computer is one intended for interactive individual use, as opposed to a mainframe computer where the end user's requests are filtered through operating staff, or a time-sharing system in which one large processor is shared by many individuals. After the development of the microprocessor, individual personal computers were low enough in cost that they eventually became affordable consumer goods. Early personal computers – generally called microcomputers – were sold often in electronic kit form and in limited numbers, and were of interest mostly to hobbyists and technicians.
An early use of the term "personal computer" appeared in a 3 November 1962, New York Times article reporting John W. Mauchly's vision of future computing as detailed at a recent meeting of the Institute of Industrial Engineers. Mauchly. stated, "There is no reason to suppose the average boy or girl cannot be master of a personal computer".
In 1968, a manufacturer took the risk of referring to their product this way, when Hewlett-Packard advertised their "Powerful Computing Genie" as "The New Hewlett-Packard 9100A personal computer". This advertisement was deemed too extreme for the target audience and replaced with a much drier ad for the HP 9100A programmable calculator.
Over the next seven years, the phrase had gained enough recognition that Byte magazine referred to its readers in its first edition as "[in] the personal computing field", and Creative Computing defined the personal computer as a "non-(time)shared system containing sufficient processing power and storage capabilities to satisfy the needs of an individual user." In 1977, three new pre-assembled small computers hit the markets which Byte would refer to as the "1977 Trinity" of personal computing. The Apple II and the PET 2001 were advertised as personal computers, while the TRS-80 was described as a microcomputer used for household tasks including "personal financial management".
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.