computer tech

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"[1]. This advertisement was too extreme for the target audience and replaced with a much drier ad for the HP 9100A programmable calculator. [2] [3] [4] 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"[5] 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." [6] Two years later when the 1977 Trinity of preassembled small computers hit the markets, the Apple II[7] and the PET 2001[8] 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. [9] The Personal Computer was also the first non-human abstract to be the Time Magazine Person of the Year.