An early use of the term "personal computer" appeared in a November 3, 1962, New York Times article reporting John W. Mauchly's vision of future computing as detailed at a recent meeting of the American Institute of Industrial Engineers. Mauchly stated, "There is no reason to suppose the average boy or girl cannot be master of a personal computer".
Six years later a manufacturer took the risk of referring to their product this way, when Hewlett-Packard advertised their "Powerful Computing Genie" as "The New Hewlett-Packard 9100A personal computer".
Computer terminals were used for time sharing access to central computers, Before the introduction of the microprocessor in the early 1970s, computers were generally large, costly systems owned by large corporations, universities, government agencies, and similar-sized institutions. End users generally did not directly interact with the machine, but instead would prepare tasks for the computer on off-line equipment, such as card punches.
A more interactive form of computer use developed commercially by the middle 1960s. In a time-sharing system, multiple computer terminals let many people share the use of one mainframe computer processor.
The IBM 610 was designed between 1948 and 1957 by John Lentz at the Watson Lab at Columbia University as the Personal Automatic Computer (PAC) and announced by IBM as the 610 Auto-Point in 1957. The IBM 610 is according to Columbia University, the first personal computer because it was the first programmable computer intended for use by one person (e.g. in an office) and controlled from a keyboard. Although it was faulted for its speed, the IBM 610 handled floating-point arithmetic naturally. With a price tag of $55,000, only 180 units were produced.
By 1976 there were several firms racing to introduce the first truly successful commercial personal computers. Three machines, the Apple II, PET 2001 and TRS-80 were all released in 1977, eventually selling millions of machines.
Although the success of the Trinity machines was relatively limited in overall terms, as component prices continued to fall, many companies entered the computer business. This led to an explosion of low-cost machines known as home computers that sold millions of units before the market imploded in a price war in the early 1980s.
In 1990, the NeXTstation workstation computer went on sale, for "interpersonal" computing as Steve Jobs described it. The NeXTstation was meant to be a new computer for the 1990s, and was a cheaper version of the previous NeXT Computer. Despite its pioneering use of Object-oriented programming concepts, the NeXTstation was somewhat a commercial failure, and NeXT shut down hardware operations in 1993.
