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Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

> The concept of "personal computer" I'm sorry to say for Americans was introduced in 1965 by Program 101

Hm, maybe an important milestone yes, but PC, no? I think the timeline goes like this:

1961 - Anita 7 - electronic desktop calculator, evolved from electro-mechanical, no stored program.

1965 - P101 - stored program, electronic desktop calculator. General purpose CPU, but the UI was completely calculator. The vision was still +-*/ only.

1968 - Mother of All Demos - this is where I argue the vision of a personal computer was fully formed

1971 - 4004 CPU - this is where you could start to actually buy parts to make a PC

1972 - Micral N - first commercially available microprocessor-based computer

1973 - Xerox Alto

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1963 - Mathatron. [1] "They laughed when I sat down to play the Mathatron". Just barely programmable. 4 memory locations. By 1967 it had been built up into a reasonable programmable calculator. 48 memory locations! Trig functions!

Early computing was mostly "if only we had more memory". Electronic arithmetic was working at IBM Research before WWII, but cost-effective fast storage was years away.

[1] http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/mathatron.html

olivetti literally called it a 'personal computer' in their ads

as i understand it, it had conditional jumps but no index registers, self-modifying code, or indirect jumps, so i think you couldn't build subroutines or data structures such as arrays

the lgp-30 was a personal computer tho even if the phrase 'personal computer' was invented later by olivetti's marketing droids

quoting https://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/c-programma101.html about interviewing its designer by phone

> When it came to talking about Mr. Perotto's assertion that the Programma 101 was the first "personal computer", I expressed my disagreement, saying that the machine was a programmable calculator, not a computer. His voice rose in intensity, and he very firmly stated that the machine was a computer, insisting that it was "not just a programmable calculator". He steadfastly refused to accept the definition of his machines as a programmable electronic calculator. We agreed to disagree (...)

as i understand it, it had conditional jumps but no index registers, self-modifying code, or indirect jumps, so i think you couldn't build subroutines or data structures such as arrays

See the links to a detailed architecture description from the book by Bell and Newell in my post at top level here. They thought it was a real computer -- just barely.

this is fantastic, thank you

The Mother of All Demos was about a lot of things but I don't remember any PC in there.

Edit: Oh ! What you are talking about is the UI of a modern PC but these UI first became available on shared computer before been available on PC.

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