Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that answer the question.
Query: What was the first personal computer?
Using the narrow definition of "operated by one person", the first personal computer was the ENIAC which became operational in 1946.[11] It did not meet further definitions of affordable or easy to use. The Bendix G15 of 1956 was intended for use without an operating staff, and several hundred were made; it was too costly to be personally owned, however.
At the time, the machine was already officially being called a "personal computer". The first manuals contain a personal note from Kutt to future customers, "But the simplicity of the MCM/70 and its associated computer language…make personal computer use and ownership a reality… Enjoy the privilege of having your own personal computer."
The system utilizes private, segregated servers that are in the possession of the news organization. Journalists use two USB flash drives and two personal computers to access SecureDrop data. The first personal computer accesses SecureDrop via the Tor network, the journalist uses the first flash drive to download encrypted data from the Internet. The second personal computer does not connect to the Internet, and is wiped during each reboot. The second flash drive contains a decryption code. The first and second flash drives are inserted into the second personal computer, and the material becomes available to the journalist. The personal computer is shut down after each use.
Apple Computer Company was founded on April 1, 1976, by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. The company's first product was the Apple I, a computer single-handedly designed and hand-built by Wozniak, and first shown to the public at the Homebrew Computer Club. Apple I was sold as a motherboard (with CPU, RAM, and basic textual-video chips), which was less than what is now considered a complete personal computer. The Apple I went on sale in July 1976 and was market-priced at $666.66 ($ in dollars, adjusted for inflation).
In a lively exchange over what has come to be referred to as "the Chinese room argument", John Searle sought to refute the claim of proponents of what he calls "strong artificial intelligence (AI)" that a computer program can be conscious, though he does agree with advocates of "weak AI" that computer programs can be formatted to "simulate" conscious states. His own view is that consciousness has subjective, first-person causal powers by being essentially intentional due simply to the way human brains function biologically; conscious persons can perform computations, but consciousness is not inherently computational the way computer programs are. To make a Turing machine that speaks Chinese, Searle imagines a room with one monolingual English speaker (Searle himself, in fact), a book that designates a combination of Chinese symbols to be output paired with Chinese symbol input, and boxes filled with Chinese symbols. In this case, the English speaker is acting as a computer and the rulebook as a program. Searle argues that with such a machine, he would be able to process the inputs to outputs perfectly without having any understanding of Chinese, nor having any idea what the questions and answers could possibly mean. If the experiment were done in English, since Searle knows English, he would be able to take questions and give answers without any algorithms for English questions, and he would be effectively aware of what was being said and the purposes it might serve. Searle would pass the Turing test of answering the questions in both languages, but he is only conscious of what he is doing when he speaks English. Another way of putting the argument is to say that computer programs can pass the Turing test for processing the syntax of a language, but that the syntax cannot lead to semantic meaning in the way strong AI advocates hoped.
In her process of evaluating our relationships with computers, Turkle interviews children, college students, engineers, AI scientists, hackers and personal computer owners in order to further understand our relationships with computers and how we interact with them on a personal level. The interviews showed that computers are both a part of our selves as well as part of the external world. In this book, Turkle tries to figure out why we think of computers in such psychological terms, how this happens and what this means for all of us.
1974 saw the introduction of what is considered by many to be the first true "personal computer", the Altair 8800 created by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS).[27][28] Based on the 8-bit Intel 8080 Microprocessor,[29] the Altair is widely recognized as the spark that ignited the microcomputer revolution[30] as the first commercially successful personal computer.[31] The computer bus designed for the Altair was to become a de facto standard in the form of the S-100 bus, and the first programming language for the machine was Microsoft's founding product, Altair BASIC.[32][33]
Over the next seven years, the phrase had gained enough recognition that "Byte" magazine referred to its readers in its first edition as "[in] the "personal computing" field", and "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." In 1977, three new pre-assembled small computers hit the markets which "Byte" would refer to as the "1977 Trinity" of personal computing. The Apple II and the PET 2001 were advertised as "personal computers", while the TRS-80 was described as 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.
Wesley Allison Clark (April 10, 1927 – February 22, 2016) was an American physicist who is credited for designing the first modern personal computer. He was also a computer designer and the main participant, along with Charles Molnar, in the creation of the LINC computer, which was the first minicomputer and shares with a number of other computers (such as the PDP-1) the claim to be the inspiration for the personal computer.
As a PC industry veteran, he pioneered the marketing and distribution of personal computer productivity software. Afterwards, he did seminal work on the integration of computers and multimedia; the integration of computers, toys and learning; the integration of computers, communication and telephony; the mobilization of email and internet access and personal computer mobility. He served on the boards of companies that introduced the first hard disk add on card for PCs, the first MP3 player, the first DVR and the first tablet computer.
Paul Terrell is an American businessman. In December 1975 he founded The Byte Shop, one of the first personal computer retailers. He helped popularize personal computing to the hobbyist and home computing markets, and was the first retailer to sell an Apple Computer—the Apple I.
If someone is talking about computers, what is said will have more meaning if the person listening has some prior idea what a computer is, what it is good for, and in what contexts one might encounter one. From the information content of a message alone, there is no way of measuring how much exformation it contains.
Kyoto Computer Gakuin was established by Yasuko and Shigeo Hasegawa in 1963. Yasuko Hasegawa, the first woman to be enrolled at Kyoto University's doctoral program in Astrophysics, formed a study group for IBM 709/7090 and started teaching to young faculty and graduate students at Kyoto University. They called the workshop as "the FORTRAN Research Seminar" which was later renamed as the "Kyoto Software Research Seminar". This workshop became Kyoto Computer Gakuin (Kyoto School of Computer Science) in 1969. Japan was then entering a period of economic growth and recovery in the post-war period and computers were still rare at that time. Only a handful of organizations like major banks, university research centers and airline companies possessed computer technology. At that time, people asked: "Why should the average person study computers? What is the computer for?" "What do we need computer education for at this time?" But Yasuko and Shigeo Hasegawa, both educators, had the foresight of the future society in the IT era.
In the mid-twentieth century, computers were extremely rare and used only by specialists. They were equipped with complicated interfaces comprehensible only to these select few. In 1968, Douglas Engelbart gave a demonstration which astonished executives at Xerox. They began work on what would eventually become the Xerox Alto. In 1973, Xerox completed work on the first personal computer, the Xerox Alto, which had a sophisticated graphical user interface (GUI) involving windows, icons, menus and a pointer. (WIMP) Unfortunately, the Xerox Alto, and its successor the Xerox Star were far too expensive for the average consumer, and suffered from poor marketing. In 1984 Apple Computer launched the Apple Macintosh, which was the first affordable and commercially successful personal computer to include a graphical user interface. The Macintosh was the second Apple Computer to ship with a graphical user interface, with the Apple Lisa being the first. In 1985, Microsoft released Microsoft Windows which bore a striking resemblance to both Macintosh, and to the Alto's interface. Windows eventually overtook Apple in the PC market to become the predominant GUI-based operating system.
Another observer claimed that IBM made decisions so slowly that, when tested, "what they found is that it would take at least nine months to ship an empty box". As with other large computer companies, its new products typically required about four to five years for development. IBM had to learn how to quickly develop, mass-produce, and market new computers. While the company traditionally let others pioneer a new market—IBM released its first commercial computer a year after Remington Rand's UNIVAC in 1951, but within five years had 85% of the market—the personal-computer development and pricing cycles were much faster than for mainframes, with products designed in a few months and obsolete quickly.
Stan Veit (25 December 1919 - 29 July 2010) was an entrepreneur and publisher who played an important role in the early days of the personal computer industry in the United States. He ran "Computer Mart," the first computer store in New York City, was the personal computer editor of "Popular Electronics" Magazine, and then Editor-in-Chief of "Computer Shopper". He published his reminiscences about the early history of the personal computer industry in a 1993 book called "Stan Veit's History of the Personal Computer."
McColough started the PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), meant to operate something like AT&T's Bell Labs. PARC researchers developed pioneering commercial products in the field of personal computers—such as the Alto personal computer, GUI (graphical user interface), the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, the first commercial mouse, Ethernet network architecture, OOP (object-oriented programming), PDL (Page Description Language), Internet protocols, and laser printing. But McColough and Xerox have been criticized for failing to take advantage of the opportunities PARC provided.
"In spite of being a veritable cradle of innovation during the formative years of personal computing and the Internet, PARC rarely convinced Xerox to take its ideas from laboratory prototypes to commercially successful products," stated an article about PARC at the "Smart Computing in Plain English" Web site. "Many of the products were taken up successfully by other companies."
There is debate about what machine was the first personal computer, the Altair 8800 (1975), the Mark-8 (1974), or even back to Kenbak-1 (1971). The computer in the January 1975 issue of "Popular Electronics" captured the attention of the 400,000 or so readers. Before then, home computers were lucky to sell a hundred units. The Altair sold thousands in the first year. By the end of 1975 there were a dozen companies producing computer kits and peripherals using the Altair circuit bus, later renamed the S-100 bus and set as an IEEE standard.
As one of its core philosophical contributions, People's Computer Company recognized in personal computing a great potential for individual empowerment and social improvement. It saw that PCs could bring the same advantages to those hampered by race, class and circumstance as to those with more advantages. It believed a digital commons could lead to more intermingling of individuals from diverse social groups. It supported early models of networking personal computers using telephone lines. It could, in hindsight, be regarded as among the first contributors to a form of what is known now as network neutrality and a fundamentally non-commercial, class-free internet.
In 1971, Lampson became one of the founding members of Xerox PARC, where he worked in the Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) as a principal scientist (1971-1975) and senior research fellow (1975-1983). His now-famous vision of a personal computer was captured in the 1972 memo entitled "Why Alto?". In 1973, the Xerox Alto, with its three-button mouse and full-page-sized monitor, was born.
It is now considered to be the first actual personal computer in terms of what has become the "canonical" GUI mode of operation.
Although mechanical examples of computers have existed through much of recorded human history, the first electronic computers were developed in the mid-20th century (1940–1945). These were the size of a large room, consuming as much power as several hundred modern personal computers (PCs).[1] Modern computers based on integrated circuits are millions to billions of times more capable than the early machines, and occupy a fraction of the space.[2] Simple computers are small enough to fit into small pocket devices, and can be powered by a small battery. Personal computers in their various forms are icons of the Information Age and are what most people think of as "computers". However, the embedded computers found in many devices from MP3 players to fighter aircraft and from toys to industrial robots are the most numerous.
PlayNet was founded in 1983 by two former GE Global Research employees, Dave Panzl and Howard Goldberg, as the first person-to-person, online communication and game network to feature home computer based graphics. The PlayNet software became the foundation for the first version of what is today America Online.
"What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry", by John Markoff, is a book about the development of the personal computer in the context of the collaboration-driven, World War II-era defense research community and the cooperatives and psychedelics of the American counterculture of the 1960s. "What the Dormouse Said" is a reference to lines at the end of the song, "Remember what the dormouse said. Feed your head."
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, is a 2005 non-fiction book by John Markoff. The book details the history of the personal computer, closely tying the ideologies of the collaboration-driven, World War II-era defense research community to the embryonic cooperatives and psychedelics use of the American counterculture of the 1960s.
In a typical first-person shooter (FPS) deathmatch session, players connect individual computers together via a computer network in a peer-to-peer model or a client–server model, either locally or over the Internet. Each individual computer generates the first person view that the computer character sees in the virtual world, hence the player sees "through the eyes" of the computer character.