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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Funny thing is that an Apple computer or any smartphone deserves the title "Personal Computer" more than my Linux PC (which has multiple accounts which can be used simultaneously).

I think we'll see more Personal Computers and devices in the future. For example, Oculus Quest is only usable with a personal Facebook account, so I would say it's a PC by definition.

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Maybe you simply misunderstand the P in PC. PC's have offered multiple user accounts historically because they were expensive machine that might be used by multiple people. Most devices at this point are liable to be single user but aren't less personal for having a function you don't need.

In fact even the iphone has a guided access feature https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202612 presumably partially so you can hand your kid the phone in a game and they can't accidentally share all your photos or spend your money.

> Maybe you simply misunderstand the P in PC.

Ok, what does the P stand for in your opinion?

> In fact even the iphone has a guided access feature

Imho, this is a much weaker form of device sharing than e.g. Linux accounts, where every user is treated equally.

P means you occupy all CPU time on a tabletop machine as opposed to normal computers or mini computers for which you share literally single CPU with multiple other users over VT100

A personal computer is one which regular people can own and control. At the dawn of the PC era this was a novelty with the contrast being very expensive systems that many users access over dumb terminals that weren't available to the general public.

When the term PC was coined by IBM they ran PC DOS and were entirely single-user and incapable of multitasking of any kind.

Yes but it isn't defined by the lack of multitasking

I mean technically it was, but only in the sense that computers at that time were generally shared systems and the pitch was that a worker/user would have their own individual (personal) computer at their desk and wouldn't have to share resources with other users, and the IBM salespeople I talked to at the time loved to talk about this. The fact that multitasking personal systems weren't feasible at the time meant that a machine could be either multitasking/multiuser or personal. That distinction died alongside DOS though.

None of that really has much to do with what the above user said about their Linux system however.

I don't think anyone has sold a consumer OS in several decades that doesn't fully support multiple accounts?

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