Giant Brains or Machines That Think

1st edition/1st printing (1949)

The first description of a personal computer, named Simon, by Edmund Callis Berkeley in Giant Brains or Machines That Think.

The first popular book on electronic computers, published years before the public heard much about the machines. The work was published by John Wiley & Sons who were enjoying surprising commercial success with Norbert Wiener’s much more technical book, Cybernetics. Berkeley did not devote a lot of his text to the actual issue of whether or not computers actually could “think,” though the topic was a kind of buzzword at the time. Among many interesting details, Giant Brains contained a discussion about a machine called Simon, which has been called the first personal computer.