Usually who invented something depends on fine distinctions of how you define that thing and just how many obscure things you know of during the time period it

Usually who invented something depends on fine distinctions of how you define that thing and just how many obscure things you know of during the time period it was invented. It's generally "known" that the Altair was the first personal computer. However, from reading Wikipedia, I found that the first microprocessor based PC seems to have been a French system a couple years before the Altair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micral https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micral On the other hand, relaxing the criteria might mean that wasn't the first either. The Kenbak-1 didn't have a microprocessor, but was arguably a personal computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenbak-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenbak-1 Perhaps this is a better choice for the first personal computer since it was a little earlier and more ancestral to modern x86, but it was also so expensive that it was not anything an ordinary person could have owned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200 Information from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_personal_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_personal_computers