1982: The personal computer is selected as Time magazine's Man (or in this case, Machine) of the Year.

It marked the first time that the editors selected a non-human recipient for the award (the planet Earth would be second, in 1988), which Time has bestowed annually since 1927.

The magazine's essay is a quaint reminder of the era's dawning awareness of the computer as a force in modern life. (In 1982, 80 percent of Americans expected that "in the fairly near future, home computers will be as commonplace as television sets or dishwashers"!)

But the primitive PCs of 1982 were doing remarkable things, things that the big mainframes had already done to transform the workplace. Once the silicon chip became the industry standard, computers dramatically shrunk in size and their moving to the home front was only a matter of time.

In 1980, according to Time, 724,000 personal computers were sold in the United States. The following year, with more companies joining the frenzy, that number doubled to 1.4 million. In 1982, the number doubled again.

In winning the nod from Time, the PC beat out some formidable competition, including Ronald Reagan (who would be named twice), Britain's Margaret Thatcher and Israel's Menachem Begin. But as the magazine opined: "There are some occasions, though, when the most significant force in a year's news is not a single individual but a process, and a widespread recognition by a whole society that this process is changing the course of all other processes."

As we sit here typing this, that's a hard argument to refute.

(Source: Time magazine)

This article first appeared on Wired.com Dec. 26, 2007.