One 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.[1]

Six years later a manufacturer took a risk at referring to their product this way when Hewlett Packard advertised their "Powerful Computing Genie" as "The New Hewlett Packard 9100A personal computer".[2] This advertisement was deemed too extreme for the target audience and replaced with a much drier ad for the HP 9100A programmable calculator.[3][4]

During the next seven years the phrase had gained usage so when Byte magazine, published its first edition it referred to its readers as being in the "personal computing field",[5] while Creative Computing defined the personal computer as a "non-(time)shared system containing sufficient processing power and storage capabilities to satisfy the needs of an individual user."[6] Two years later when the 1977 Trinity of preassembled small computers hit the markets, the Apple II[7] and the PET 2001[8] were advertised as personal computers, while the TRS-80 was a microcomputer used for household tasks including "personal financial management". By 1979 over half a million microcomputers were sold and the youth of the day had a new concept of the personal computer.[9]

On January 3 1983, the Personal Computer was the first non-human to be announced as Person of the Year by Time Magazine, in 1982.[10]

The initialism PC may refer generically to a personal computer, or may be intended to refer to one of the original IBM PC compatible computers, or may refer to a Microsoft Windows computer currently available.