The birth of the personal computer: everything you know is wrong

This could be an entertaining or totally aggravating, lawyer invoking party game—ask when the personal computer was invented. Someone did—ask that is. There’s a charming site located in Seattle called Blinkenlights Archeological Institute. It was established in 1997 to excavate, preserve, research, and present interesting and historically significant computing devices. The website, http://www. blinkenlights.com/pc.shtml, lists seven qualifications of what constitutes a PC and then goes on to list the relay-based Minivac and the Simon that used electric rotary switches. So, in reading the site’s entries, it occurred to me that additional classification is needed: the type of switch—i.e., relay, vacuum