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"Personal Computer" vs. "Home Computer"

falter

falter

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Question: is there a difference between a "personal computer" and a "home computer"? I ask this because sometimes when I do videos or such, I'm not sure which term is appropriate to apply to the earliest machines we think of as the first 'personal' computers (mostly microcomputers). I feel like when people say "the first personal computer that.." they usually mean a "home" computer, something the average person can afford. I can't prove it at the second, but I'm sure when reading through historical docs I've seen references to "personal computers" prior to the arrival of microcomputers in the early 1970s, but in that context they meant a business computer that was operated or used basically by one person. I know for example Dr. John Mauchly apparently developed a 50lb suitcase computer of some sort in the early 60s that could be considered 'personal', and he made a lot of predictions about "personal computers" going forward.

Am I correct on that latter point? Did such a thing exist? Were people using the term "personal computer" to describe an individual use machine that actually existed well prior to microcomputers? Is there a distinction between "personal computer" and "home computer" in an historical context? Obviously I'm leaving aside "personal computer" as it applies to DOS/Windows based machines that came later.
 
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Not as far as I'm concerned...

I have a computer at home I set up for my own personal usage. No else uses it except for me.

Shouldn't this be a poll? Saves repeating the same old talking points over and over again.
 
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Didn't this come up before?

TL;DR, it looks like "personal computer" was coined sometime in the early 1960s or so, meaning like you said, a computer dedicated to be used interactively by a single person. "Home computer" appears to have been in circulation not a long time after that, but generally in the context of "futuristic" demos, etc. (Because obviously there was no such thing as a computer cheap enough to take home in the 1960's.)

Frankly I don't think it matters what term you use when describing the first kit microcomputers, because "home computer" is just a subset of "personal computer" with an upper bound defined by price. (There is no such thing as a "home mainframe".) An extremely broad rule of thumb for the 1970's is probably something like if its starting price is under a thousand bucks you can call it a "home computer" with a straight face.

By the early 80's the distinction maybe became a little more formal, often labeling computers that, say, had 40 column or less video displays (ie, could be reasonably used on a TV) or had cartridge slots and joysticks as "home" computers, but, yeah, it's not like there was an official board that decided these things. It still just meant "cheap personal computer".
 
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Caluser2000 said:
Yes Many many times before......
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Yes I'm sure this topic has been covered before as probably have most topics, so apologies. I did do a cursory search for posts on it but my forum fu skills aren't the best. It's one of those things that provokes debate from time to time.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
Didn't this come up before?

TL;DR, it looks like "personal computer" was coined sometime in the early 1960s or so, meaning like you said, a computer dedicated to be used interactively by a single person. "Home computer" appears to have been in circulation not a long time after that, but generally in the context of "futuristic" demos, etc. (Because obviously there was no such thing as a computer cheap enough to take home in the 1960's.)

Frankly I don't think it matters what term you use when describing the first kit microcomputers, because "home computer" is just a subset of "personal computer" with an upper bound defined by price. (There is no such thing as a "home mainframe".) An extremely broad rule of thumb for the 1970's is probably something like if its starting price is under a thousand bucks you can call it a "home computer" with a straight face.

By the early 80's the distinction maybe became a little more formal, often labeling computers that, say, had 40 column or less video displays (ie, could be reasonably used on a TV) or had cartridge slots and joysticks as "home" computers, but, yeah, it's not like there was an official board that decided these things. It still just meant "cheap personal computer".
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Yes but people do get pedantic about these things sometimes. I mean we could call an LGP-30 a personal computer couldn't we? It just makes it awkward when you're doing an historical video and you mention 'the first personal computers', usually meaning microcomputers, and someone corrects you and says personal computers existed before those. I know the term existed as a label for future products, but I wondered if there was any significant usage with regards to pre-70s products.
 
Home computer: the inadequate computer other people wasted their money on.

Personal computer: the superb computer I wasted my money on.

Some of the magazines had carefully specified differences for marketing purposes so that home computer users would have a different magazine than the personal computer users.
 
falter said:
It just makes it awkward when you're doing an historical video and you mention 'the first personal computers', usually meaning microcomputers, and someone corrects you and says personal computers existed before those.
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Those people are being stupid and you should ignore them.

An LPG-30 cost $47,000 in 1956, that is half a million dollars today. If you could afford that much to have one all to yourself, sure, knock yourself out, it’s a “personal computer”.

The term was coined in the 1960’s because it was becoming clear that the technology was changing at such a pace that it probably wasn’t going to be long before computers *could* be something that could literally sit on someone’s desk and be cheap enough to potentially equip every employee with one, but this didn’t actually *happen* in the 1960’s outside of labs or instances that kind of stretch the definition of what we’d call a “personal computer”. The first known commercial use of the term was in a 1968 ad for the HP 9100 calculator, which, sure, is essentially a computer, but only just, and it cost about $50,000 in today’s money so… yeah.

Sometimes people need to STFU. I mean, I’ll admit I’ve gotten on people’s cases for saying so-in-so “invented” the personal computer in the 1970’s because there’s such a broad continuum of prior art going back over 20 years earlier that it renders the term “invention” moot, but *realistically* everyone knows what you mean when you say “personal computer”, and a critical part of the casual definition is a machine cheap enough for a “normal” person to afford. Claiming the LPG-30 is a ”personal computer” is like saying an F-104 Starfighter is a “private plane” in the vein of a Piper Cub because both seat only one or two people. No.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
Those people are being stupid and you should ignore them.

An LPG-30 cost $47,000 in 1956, that is half a million dollars today. If you could afford that much to have one all to yourself, sure, knock yourself out, it’s a “personal computer”.

The term was coined in the 1960’s because it was becoming clear that the technology was changing at such a pace that it probably wasn’t going to be long before computers *could* be something that could literally sit on someone’s desk and be cheap enough to potentially equip every employee with one, but this didn’t actually *happen* in the 1960’s outside of labs or instances that kind of stretch the definition of what we’d call a “personal computer”. The first known commercial use of the term was in a 1968 ad for the HP 9100 calculator, which, sure, is essentially a computer, but only just, and it cost about $50,000 in today’s money so… yeah.

Sometimes people need to STFU. I mean, I’ll admit I’ve gotten on people’s cases for saying so-in-so “invented” the personal computer in the 1970’s because there’s such a broad continuum of prior art going back over 20 years earlier that it renders the term “invention” moot, but *realistically* everyone knows what you mean when you say “personal computer”, and a critical part of the casual definition is a machine cheap enough for a “normal” person to afford. Claiming the LPG-30 is a ”personal computer” is like saying an F-104 Starfighter is a “private plane” in the vein of a Piper Cub because both seat only one or two people. No.
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I most definitely concur. Some people are just far too smart for their own and anyone else's good.....Muppets.

Now back to xbill on the 386DX25.......Which by the way is another personal computer at home;)
 
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I'll add only that at the time, the difference was obvious. Either you ran a terminal connected to a mainframe, or you had a computer on your desk (Personal computer).
Recall that before the late 70s, storage was extremely expensive, so a centralized system servicing terminals was the most economical. I worked on, and still have an ISA PCB that attempted to bridge the divide by masquerading as an MDA displaying on a VT100-type terminal, while also accepting remote serial (RS232C) input. One could even run the two simulaneously, split-screen.

Of course, the rapid advances in PC tech rendered it obsolete very quickly.

Then there were the low-end systems (some with limited storage and run with cassettes or cartridges) that were intended for home use.

It seems strange now that I can buy a 120GB SSD for about a sawbuck and PCs have local storage in the multi-GB range. 40 years ago, that was only a drug-induced dream....
 
Yes this topic has come up before in various forms. One of them being I posted a thread "PDP-8/S: The first computer in the world in a private house, 1967" some years back
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/pdp-8-s-the-first-computer-in-the-world-in-a-private-house-1967.45288/
(that video is still available on Youtube, search 'What the future sounded like')
But that claim was preceded by an informative post in that thread about Mary Allen Wilkes who had a LINC at home in 1965.
However Zinovieff's machine was privately owned by him whereas Wilkes' wasn't (AFAIK).
 
I am probably much too young to use my memory as having a shred of authority, but still, I can tell you what the words did mean in my memory, about 40 years ago: a personal computer was an IBM PC-family member or -clone. A homecomputer was one of the 8-bit computers that hit the market, and some of the 16-bit computers that followed, Apple, TRS, Commodore, and so on. Until ST, QL, Amiga, and then this breed died off mostly.
 
Home Computer (for educating your children [playing games]).
computer-ads-families-1980s-17.jpg


Personal Computer (for p0rn)
2-bit-compute-better-than-1.jpg
 
1944GPW said:
Yes this topic has come up before in various forms. One of them being I posted a thread "PDP-8/S: The first computer in the world in a private house, 1967" some years back
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/pdp-8-s-the-first-computer-in-the-world-in-a-private-house-1967.45288/
(that video is still available on Youtube, search 'What the future sounded like')
But that claim was preceded by an informative post in that thread about Mary Allen Wilkes who had a LINC at home in 1965.
However Zinovieff's machine was privately owned by him whereas Wilkes' wasn't (AFAIK).
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Those are cute examples and all, but the LINC was (in today’s money) a half million dollar machine and the PDP-8/S cost Peter Zinovieff the equivalent of over 88,000 uk pounds. (Around $110,000.) These are clearly examples of work being brought home.

Again, I’m totally willing to take these as examples of why you can’t say (insert name here) “invented” the personal computer in 197x because functionally they were just replicating in a much cheaper form a computer you *could* technically buy off the shelf in 1967 (and the credit for making this possible lies pretty much entirely in the hands of the collective silicon chip industry, they knew exactly what they were selling), but *practically* speaking sane humans generally agree that a “personal” or “home” computer can’t cost more than the building it lives in.
 
This.is.Matt said:
▲▲▲ "4800 Baud Digital Cassette" ??? Surely cassettes were all analogue until DAT/DCC appeared on the scene?
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A lot of the high speed cassette drives replaced the audio input with a direct connection to the read/write heads. The signal processed was digital. While it lacked the speed it should have had, the Commodore Datasette was a digital cassette. Bitsavers has some documents for the Technico Super Starter System which might provide a detailed explanation of how their digital cassette works.
 
And of course when we’re just talking about computer data storage, not digital audio recording, there were tons of systems that used Phillips Compact Cassette tapes as the medium but used customized transport decks controlled directly by the computer in addition to having direct digital to the read/write head. Slightly predating true microcomputers is the tape decks built into WANG 2200s, while a moderately well known (but not actually very popular) example from the later 70’s was the Digital Group “Phi-Deck”. Maybe the last gasp of these systems was the infamous high-speed tape deck built into the Coleco ADAM computer.

The Commodore tape decks are pretty weird, in how they do the direct digital connection but don’t really take advantage of it, at least from a performance standpoint. They are at least more reliable than systems that have to suffer through the analog conversion usually manage.
 
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