30 Jul
2006
30 Jul
'06
2:26 a.m.
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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