On December 26, 1982, Time magazine selected the computer as its person (or in this case, Machine) of the Year. It was the first time since its 1927 inception that Time‘s editors selected a non-human recipient for the award. The planet Earth was the second, in 1988. Prior to 1999, Time called it Man of the Year.

Controversial Time Person of the Year winners

Time‘s Person (Machine) of the Year in 1982 was the computer. Because times were changing. Fast.

Being person of the year isn’t necessarily an honor. Controversial figures, including some of the worst of the worst people who ever lived, won the title in the past, including Adolf Hitler (1938), Joseph Stalin (1939 and 1942), Nikita Khrushchev (1957), and Ayatollah Khomeini (1979). I would add a few others to the list, including Mark Zuckerberg (2010), and the white supremacists I’ll decline to mention by name who won in 2016, 2021, and 2024.

Time‘s Machine of the Year, 1982

But awarding the person of the year to the computer in 1982 was a sign of the times. Having lived through that time, it did seem like we were experiencing the early stages of a dawn of a new age. Even though I was still very young, I could tell the times were changing, and changing fast.

The magazine’s 1982 essay is a quaint reminder of the era’s dawning awareness of the computer as a force in modern life. For example, it said 80 percent of Americans expected that “in the fairly near future, home computers will be as commonplace as television sets or dishwashers.” Remember, in 1982, it was still common for households to have only one or two television sets.

Even still, the essay spent a lot of time explaining just what a home computer could do. The general public was aware that computers were available and that people were buying them. But it was still news to many in 1982 what people were doing with them besides playing video games. Telecommunications and e-mail got a lot of attention in the article. Modems were still very expensive and uncommon in 1982, but prices were dropping. Of course, modems would prove completely necessary once the Internet came into homes. Even though the World Wide Web was still 8 years away in 1982, we had services like Compuserve to serve a similar function.

How computers were becoming more common

The essay stated that in 1980, a total of 724,000 personal computers were sold in the United States. The following year, with more companies entering the field, including IBM, that number doubled to 1.4 million. IBM hoped to sell 800 units from August to December 1981 and ended up selling more like 48,000. In 1982, the number doubled again to 2.8 million, partly on the strength of the hot selling Commodore VIC-20 and Timex Sinclair 1000. A notable newcomer that year was Compaq, who sold a modest quantity of 50,000 of its IBM-compatible luggable PC, but would prove extremely influential by mid-decade. Another notable newcomer in 1982 was the Commodore 64, which ended up selling 12 million units in its lifetime and soon became the best-selling computer model of all time.

Future influence of Time‘s 1982 Person of the Year

Time‘s essay wrapped up with a poignant quote from M.I.T. computer scientist Marvin Minsky, who predicted a kind of democratization of the new technology. “The desktop revolution has brought the tools that only professionals have had into the hands of the public. God knows what will happen now,” Minsky said.

I hesitate to quote Minsky, given his connections with Jeffrey Epstein. But his quote was what Time went with. And Minsky’s prediction was correct. While I’d say the influence of Time‘s 1982 Person of the Year, the computer, has been more good than bad, some of what’s happened has been very bad.

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.