Etymology
An early use of the term "personal computer" appeared in a November 3, 1962, New York Times article reporting John W. Mauchly's vision of future computing as detailed at a recent meeting of the American Institute of Industrial Engineers. Mauchly stated, "There is no reason to suppose the average boy or girl cannot be master of a personal computer".
Six years later 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 when Byte magazine published its first edition, it referred to its readers as " 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." Two years later, when what Byte was to call the "1977 Trinity" of pre-assembled small computers hit the markets, the Apple II and the PET 2001 were advertised as personal computers, while the TRS-80 was a described as 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.
Read more about this topic: History Of Personal Computers
Famous quotes containing the word etymology:
“The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.”
—Giambattista Vico (1688–1744)
“Semantically, taste is rich and confusing, its etymology as odd and interesting as that of “style.” But while style—deriving from the stylus or pointed rod which Roman scribes used to make marks on wax tablets—suggests activity, taste is more passive.... Etymologically, the word we use derives from the Old French, meaning touch or feel, a sense that is preserved in the current Italian word for a keyboard, tastiera.”
—Stephen Bayley, British historian, art critic. “Taste: The Story of an Idea,” Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things, Random House (1991)