Also tricky is what is meant by 'invented'? You can invent something without actually physically building it. In which case I think you'd have a good argument for saying it was Alan Turing as he was the one to come up with the idea of a universal machine and general purpose (personal or not) computers.
For legal purposes, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (to use an example) does not define ideas as inventions, so Turing would not have been credited with inventing anything had he submitted a patent application on his ideas.
In past years, one had to actually build and submit a working example of one's invention in order to obtain a patent. That requirement soon became unwieldy and submission of suitable drawings, as well as the detailed description of the invention, took over. The key aspect was that it had to be possible for anyone "skilled in the art" to be able to build a working example from the patent documentation. The rise of software patents seems to have done an end run around these requirements.
Babbage sort of conjured the idea of a general purpose computer but could not have built it due to the limitations of the technology of his time.
His "engines" were to have been steam-operated, which had they become useful to business and commerce, would have created some interesting problems. Imagine the boss saying, "Simon, we have to run the payroll." And you replying, "Sir, we don't have enough coal for the boiler."
Now we seem to have reached a point where most normal people (and that includes no one here
) see a computer as little more than an appliance. I am always complaining at work (I test software) that tablets have gotten us to the point where things are so dumbed down interacting with a computer is little more than an ape jabbing randomly at the screen with his fat little fingers. It annoys me we have to make the software work on the most unusable devices. It makes for some interesting UI designs these days.
This is progression of computer technology that was predicted in the 1970s. Just to show how little most folks know about operating a computer, I occasionally demonstrate that it is possible to use most of Microsoft Windows with keystrokes only. Observers are usually dumbfounded that the mouse isn't as essential as it would seem, not realizing that it is a crutch that is there to prop up the naive.
I really dislike tablets (although I do have one and keep hoping it dies soon). So would you call a tablet a personal computer?
I call a tablet an overpriced toy that causes people to waste an enormous amount of time poking around on "social media." The absurd is seeing several couples sitting at a table in a restaurant, all of them making like monkeys on their gadgets and not saying a word to each other.
As for hoping that your tablet soon dies, you can accelerate the process by using it as a wheel-stop for a locomotive.
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