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The term home computer has also been used, primarily in the late 1970s and 1980s. The advent of personal computers and the concurrent Digital Revolution have significantly affected the lives of people. Institutional or corporate computer owners in the 1960s had to write their own programs to do any useful work with computers.
The history of the personal computer as a mass-market consumer electronic device began with the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s. A personal computer is one intended for interactive individual use, as opposed to a mainframe computer where the end user's requests are filtered through operating staff, or a time-sharing system in which one large processor is shared by many individuals.
Human computers were involved in calculating ballistics tables during World War I. [38] Between the two world wars, computers were used in the Department of Agriculture in the United States and also at Iowa State College. [39] The human computers in these places also used calculating machines and early electrical computers to aid in their work ...
Replacing the hobbyists who had made up the majority of the home computer market were, as Compute! described them, "people who want to take work home from the office now and then, play a game now and then, learn more about computers, and help educate their children". By 1986, industry experts predicted an "MS-DOS Christmas", and the magazine ...
A human computer, with microscope and calculator, 1952. It was not until the mid-20th century that the word acquired its modern definition; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known use of the word computer was in a different sense, in a 1613 book called The Yong Mans Gleanings by the English writer Richard Brathwait: "I haue [] read the truest computer of Times, and the best ...
Many people built or assembled their own computers as per published designs. For example, many thousands of people built the Galaksija home computer later in the early 1980s. The Altair was influential. It came before Apple Computer, as well as Microsoft which produced and sold the Altair BASIC programming language interpreter, Microsoft's ...
A desktop computer, often abbreviated as desktop, [1] is a personal computer designed for regular use at a stationary location on or near a desk (as opposed to a portable computer) due to its size and power requirements.
Computer programming or coding is the composition of sequences of instructions, called programs, that computers can follow to perform tasks. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] It involves designing and implementing algorithms , step-by-step specifications of procedures, by writing code in one or more programming languages .