Personal Computer

computer intended for personal use; microcomputer

A personal computer (PC) is a computer whose original sales price, size, and capabilities make it useful for individuals.It is unknown who coined the phrase with the intent of a small affordable computing device but John W. Mauchly described such a device in a November 3, 1962 New York Times article entitled "Pocket Computer may replace Shopping List". Six years later a manufacturer took a risk at 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 too extreme for the target audience and replaced with a much drier ad for the HP 9100A programmable calculator. During the next 7 years the phrase had gained usage so when Byte magazine, published its first edition it referred to its readers as being in the "personal computing field" while 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." Two years later when the 1977 Trinity of preassembled small computers hit the markets, the Apple II and the PET 2001 were advertised as 'personal computers' while the TRS-80 was a microcomputer used for household tasks including "personal financial management". By 1979 over half a million microcomputers were sold and the youth of the day had a new concept of the personal computer. The Personal Computer was also the first non-human abstract to be the Time Magazine Person of the Year.
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personal computer, PC, home computer, computer intended for personal or individual use

n. personal computer

<computer> (PC) A general-purpose single-user microcomputer designed to be operated by one person at a time.
This term and the concept has been successfully hijacked by IBM due to the huge market share of the IBM PC, despite its many obvious weaknesses when compared to other equally valid claimants to the term, e.g. the Acorn Archimedes, Amiga, Atari, Macintosh.
(1994-11-02)