ORIGINS
Who coined the term personal computer? The Oxford English Dictionary says magazine used it first, in its May 1976 issue. But OED etymologist and Yale Law School librarian Fred Shapiro decided to do some digging on his own - with help from JSTOR (www.jstor.org), an online electronic database for academic periodicals. JSTOR's arts and sciences archive offers hi-res scans of 5 million pages from 117 journals, some dating back 150 years. Using optical character recognition software, JSTOR creates searchable files for each document, allowing full-text searches across 15 academic fields. Subscribers in the US pay an installation fee of up to $45,000 and an annual fee of up to $8,500 - the amount depends on the institution's size. More than 800 universities, public libraries, and other institutions worldwide have signed on.
While searching for the origin of personal computer, Shapiro uncovered several competing claims. Stewart Brand, founder of Whole Earth Catalog, says on his Web site that he first referred to a "personal computer" in a 1974 book; and GUI pioneer Alan Kay is said to have used the term in a paper published in 1972.
But a search on JSTOR's general science archive turned up what Shapiro says is the earliest documented use of personal computer, in the October 4, 1968, issue of Science. The issue contains a Hewlett-Packard ad for its new HP 9100A. "The new Hewlett-Packard 9100A personal computer," the ad proclaims, is "ready, willing, and able ... to relieve you of waiting to get on the big computer." The $4,900 device - a desktop scientific calculator equipped with magnetic cards - doesn't seem like much of a computer nowadays. And at 40 pounds, it wasn't very personal, either. But according to Shapiro, it was the first device to be called a personal computer.
Shapiro, who is also editing the new Yale Dictionary of Quotations (quotationdictionary.com), credits JSTOR with helping him show that many quotes are older than was previously thought. Although Bartlett's Familiar Quotations attributes "There's no such thing as a free lunch," to economist Milton Friedman, Shapiro says he found an earlier citation in a 1952 edition of the journal Ethics. "In reality," says Shapiro, "Friedman's been getting a free lunch off this claim."
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