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"Personal Computer" vs. "Home Computer"

Eudimorphodon said:
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.
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Okay so we're in agreement that a 'personal computer' isn't merely a work device that is exclusively operated by one person. It has to be something an individual of average means could afford on their own, for their own use.
 
falter said:
Okay so we're in agreement that a 'personal computer' isn't merely a work device that is exclusively operated by one person. It has to be something an individual of average means could afford on their own, for their own use.
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Wasn't it obvious from the start?
 
falter said:
Okay so we're in agreement that a 'personal computer' isn't merely a work device that is exclusively operated by one person. It has to be something an individual of average means could afford on their own, for their own use.
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I don't know about this; I think it could lead to some silly places. For example, if you wait long enough for a computer to depreciate in value, does it at some point become a personal computer?

Ultimately I think what distinguishes a "personal computer" is the intention with which it was built or used. This bugs a lot of analytically-minded folks because you can't get your ruler out or look at price sheets and measure intent. Too bad! Unfortunately, you already agree with me :p

Consider the Commodore 65. Undoubtedly a personal computer and probably a "home computer" by the conventional use of the term, although that probably would have fallen out of fashion by 1991. Not for sale at any price, though: if you wanted to buy your own in '91, you would have had to purchase Commodore (not within "average means") or commit some kind of theft (most "average means" types don't want to incur debt to society either). So I guess the Commodore 65 isn't a personal computer. But that's silly... they designed it to be a personal computer, didn't they? You'd obviously use it that way, wouldn't you? Oops, that's intent!

It's actually even more complicated than all that --- context matters. But I'll spare us all those musings.

The philosophy of language is a fun field that's been chipping away at these issues for a few centuries; I don't think we're going to work it out here. Paging Gottlob Frege...
 
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What's bugging me with this is I am 90% sure I've seen machines described as a 'personal computer' and manufactured with intent to be such prior to 1973 before. I just can't find where I'd read that.
 
stepleton said:
Not for sale at any price, though: if you wanted to buy your own in '91, you would have had to purchase Commodore (not within "average means") or commit some kind of theft (most "average means" types don't want to incur debt to society either).
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Actually, no? Most of the units in circulation were bought fairly cheaply as scrap when Commodore was liquidated. Whatever they sell for now there was a brief period when an “average joe” in the right place could have had one real cheap.

Anyway, obviously ”original intent” does kind of matter here. The C65 was *intended* to be a cheap consumer product but ended up being just a failed prototype abandoned by a flailing dying company: that ”normal humans” never got to buy one at retail *is* beside the point. On the flip side, the “depreciation“ argument, I’m going to use an airplane analogy again: A North American P-51 Mustang cost the US government about $50,000 in 1945, just shy of a million bucks today, but only a couple years after the war you could buy one for about the price of a nice Cadillac, or not a whole lot more than a Cessna or other “real” private plane cost. The reasons not a lot of “normal” people ending up owning them are pretty obvious: little details like consuming around 50 gallons of gasoline an hour, minimum, just to stay in the air made them a little impractical, but sure, from just a purchase price standpoint you could call it a “private aircraft“… but no, it’s not, sorry.

P-51s are still “Fighters” even if you paint one bright red and fly it in circles around pylons instead of using it to chase Me262s. And a “straight-8” PDP-8 is still a “Minicomputer” even if it’s in your garage sucking up electricity at a positively comical rate compared to the Apple Watch on your wrist that could not just “run rings” around it, but achieve low earth orbit.
 
falter said:
Okay so we're in agreement that a 'personal computer' isn't merely a work device that is exclusively operated by one person. It has to be something an individual of average means could afford on their own, for their own use.
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So business/commercial users didn't use PCs? What do you think that "PC" stands for? Are we inventing new definitions?
 
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falter said:
What's bugging me with this is I am 90% sure I've seen machines described as a 'personal computer' and manufactured with intent to be such prior to 1973 before. I just can't find where I'd read that.
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Machines going back to the CDC-160 in 1960 (fit into a *very* heavy desk, cost about a million bucks) were sometimes described as “single-user” computers, but… again, this is getting silly. I know the Internet just loooooves “Is a hotdog a sandwich?” arguments, and sure, there *is* some serious gray area you can point to from the late 1960’s involving machines *merely* as expensive as really nice cars as opposed to houses, but anyone just waiting around wanting to use this lack of a black and white answer to the question of “what’s the first personal computer?” to scream “Gotchya!” in your Youtube comments like Yugo Moto slapping down his trap card is a fargin’ moron.

(Is breakfast cereal soup? Is ravioli a burrito? I demand definitive answers to these questions right now.)

If you really want a word that at least to some degree limits scope call everything on your channel (unless you *really* get ambitious with your purchases) a “microcomputer”. The standard definition hinges on the computer using a “microprocessor“ as the central processing unit, and while there’s still a *little* bit of gray area here (there are multi-chip “CPUs” like the DEC LSI-11 or National Semiconductor IMP-16 that call themselves “microprocessors“ in their advertising literature) it at least pins things pretty firmly into the 1970’s.
 
Yep. Strictly speaking “Microcomputer“ excludes the Kenbak-1, despite it having been awarded the title of “first personal computer” before. (I think “home computer” might have been more apropos, because price alone is really the criteria they were going by, but that’s splitting hairs.) Which is fine. It also excludes bitslice monstrosities like the Wang 2200 or Xerox Alto (machines which present much more like modern “personal computers” than either a Kenbak-1 or an unexpanded Altair 8800), and gets into gray area with the IBM 5100, which maaaybe makes it into Microcomputer-land but only because its PALM CPU is all custom bits instead of off the shelf bitslice parts.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
If you really want a word that at least to some degree limits scope call everything on your channel (unless you *really* get ambitious with your purchases) a “microcomputer”. The standard definition hinges on the computer using a “microprocessor“ as the central processing unit, and while there’s still a *little* bit of gray area here (there are multi-chip “CPUs” like the DEC LSI-11 or National Semiconductor IMP-16 that call themselves “microprocessors“ in their advertising literature) it at least pins things pretty firmly into the 1970’s.
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Or a cage of cards that could be microprogrammed and having nothing to do with device integration.
We're through the looking-glass here, folks. All salute Humpty-Dumpty! :)
 
Laine Nooney's (very good) new book "The Apple II Age: How The Computer Became Personal" in some ways revolves entirely around this and related questions. The whole introduction seems to be available in the Google Books preview here, and it speaks to this-- it's an interesting and sometimes distinct addition to the conversation; may be a useful perspective.

(That said, I don't know if additional nuance is the best defense against the strident YouTube comments… but it should be :) )
 
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