It's short form for "IBM PC Compatible", something that was printed on a lot of floppy disks back in the early 1980s. It was used to differentiate between "Atari" (which was a computer), "Apple" (which wasn't a Macintosh), "C64", and "Tandy" in the USA, and certainly others elsewhere in the world.
The primary use of the term among (semi-)technical people has evolved to mean the defacto open standard personal computer platform that has a BIOS and uses the Intel 32 bit / AMD 64 bit instruction set.
The use of PC to literally mean "Personal Computer", a computer used by one person, is falling out of vogue. Apple obviously is running from the term, and as far as I can think the only other non-Windows platforms (Sun, for example) fancy themselves to be "Workstations" -- users and vendors alike would take umbrage at the suggestion that they're mere PCs, even though they're the same size, shape, come with a keyboard and mouse, and are often less powerful.
Technically, Macs were the first Personal Computers, then the IBM-clones came out... the clones were what most people had. Then it was just IBM(and clones) vs Mac, and BAM! people thought PCs were IBM-based machines.
Unfortunately for us geeks, Apple is going to continue to use PC to mean non-mac until PC actually means PC for the average person.
Apple is going to continue to use PC to mean non-mac until PC actually means PC for the average person.
That's an entirely normal marketing move. "A car is just a car, but a Cadillac is a luxury vehicle." Same thing, positioning everything else as being "just" a PC, while suggesting that a Mac is special.
Which it is, really. To anyone outside of our little echo chamber here, a Mac is entirely unlike a PC, and it has nothing to do with Apple's ads. At work they are given a "PC," and it is different from the iMac they see in my children's playroom in almost every way that counts to them.
I think he meant the Micral (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micral) although I'd accept the Altair 8800 (which predated the Apple II by two years) as the first Personal Computer to run an operating system that was familiar enough to users for mainstream PC use (by which I mean IMDOS, a stripped down CP/M implementation).
PC stands for 'Personal Computer' - right?
How is that synonymous with an operating system (Windows)???!