30 Jul
2006
30 Jul
'06
9:48 a.m.
You guys ever see Doug Salot's web page on this topic?
http://www.blinkenlights.com/pc.shtml
-----Original Message-----
From: Jules Richardson [mailto:julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk]
Sent: Sunday, July 30, 2006 5:26 AM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: Classic computers sighting (article)
Chuck Guzis wrote:
Okay, these folks are claiming that the Kenbak is the
earliest
personal computer, but wouldn't that honor go to the Viatron from
about 1968? Or maybe the Honeywell "Kitchen Computer", the H-316 of about
the same time?
Both were marketed to the home user.
What are the rules in this competition?
I wondered that, too. Surely price doesn't come into it as who's to say what
was affordable and what wasn't by an individual? (e.g. something like a
Zonda is still a car even though it's only accessible to a handful of
people)
And surely the 'personal' aspect should reflect the nature of the
interaction between the user and the machine and nothing more?
The only real qualifiers that I could be certain of are size (i.e.
desk-sized or less), a 1:1 nature between the user and the computer, and the
ability to load custom programs from storage and run them (thus ruling out a
terminal hooked to a printer being called a word processor :-)
By those categories though, worldwide there must have been several
contenders around the late 1960's.
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