According to J. Presper Eckert in “Who Needs Personal Computers?”, Sperry was planning to built a PC (and apparently built a prototype) as early as in the 1950s:
“During the late 1950s I was involved in trying to build what could now be called a personal computer, probably the first such machine to fit on a desktop. We used hundreds of magnetic core amplifiers and diodes, a few transistors and tubes, and a motor-driven drum for memory storage. The same motor powered a flyprinter, which typed the computer’s output onto a moving strip of paper. Unlike the first microcomputer systems, which came later, our machine included a keyboard for easy input. We figured we could sell our Desk Computer for $5,000. Some insurance firms expressed interest, but our executives just couldn’t see business need for that small a computer.”
I think something interesting happened when computers became mass-produced - before which, they were built as one of a short production run, before which each one was a unique design and implementation.
For my own definition of computer - something which performs computation - I’m quite keen on recognising the programmable calculators. Two notable early ones are Olivetti’s Programma 101
and the not-entirely-unrelated 9100 from Hewlett-Packard (“due to the similarities of the machines, Hewlett-Packard was ordered to pay about $900,000 in royalties to Olivetti”)
Both are great marvels of technology and engineering. Another machine which must be remembered is the amazing MCM/70, a portable/luggable machine, self-contained, with a one-line display and which swapped to cassette tape, and which offered APL as the programming language and user interface. https://www.xnumber.com/xnumber/MCM_70_microcomputer.htm
Oops, I meant also to mention the Memex, being an idea, from 1945, of a machine which allowed the user to bring up information and - crucially - to create links between items, and to annotate them, and to share these links. More than a personal computer, in some ways.
And people today, get mad when I refer to an Apple computer as a PC.
Yeah… I don’t care how mad they get. I still say that their machine is personally owned.
One advantage of drum computers, they do Rock n Roll quite well.
Joking aside,The drum/disc they could keep a few of the most common applications
online without to reload them if you had ample space.
Here, the work table is no longer laden with books. In their place stands a screen and a telephone within reach. Far away, in a huge building, are all the books and all the information, with all the space required for their recording and handling, with all the apparatus of catalogs, bibliographies, and indexes, with all the redistribution of data on cards, sheets, and in files, with the selection and combination carried out by well-qualified permanent staff. The place of storage and classification also becomes a place of distribution, remotely with or without wires, television or teletype. From there, the page to be read is displayed on the screen to provide the answer to questions asked by telephone, with or without wires. A screen would be double, quadruple, or tenfold if it were a matter of multiplying the texts and documents to be compared simultaneously; there would be a loudspeaker if the view needed to be aided by auditory data, if the vision needed to be supplemented by hearing. Wells would certainly like such a hypothesis. It is a utopia today because it does not yet exist anywhere, but it could well become a reality tomorrow, provided that our methods and instruments are further refined. And this refinement could perhaps go so far as to make the retrieval of documents on screen automatic (simple classification numbers, book numbers, page numbers); the subsequent projection could also be automatic, provided that all the data had been reduced to its analytical elements and arranged to be implemented by the selection machines.
Translated from French with DeepL.com (free version)
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.
