Have you given your personal computer a name yet? If you have, then congratulations. If not, then you might want to think about a name for your computer so that you can celebrate Name Your PC Day. This holiday is observed annually on November 20th, and people all around the world celebrate this day by naming their personal computers.

Millions of people have already given their computers names. What are some of the names people give to their PCs? People have named their computers after anime characters, mythological deities, James Bond characters, literary figures, cartoon characters, astronauts, and even after Muppets.

The History Of Name Your PC Day

We’re not going to bore our readers with an involved history of computers—a history that technically goes all the way back to the 19th century when a steam-powered calculating machine was invented by mathematician Charles Babbage.

Instead, we’ll jump ahead to the 1970s when the first minicomputer kit was covered by Popular Electronics in their January 1975 issue. They covered the Altair 8080, a machine that rivaled commercial models. Paul Allen and Bill Gates offered to write software for the Altair using the new BASIC language, and these two would end up forming Microsoft.

In 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple Computer on April Fool’s Day. They would unveil the Apple I, the first computer with a single-circuit board and Read-Only Memory (ROM). The following year, Radio Shack began a 3,000-unit production run of its TRS-80 Model 1. It was priced at $599, and within a year, the company would receive a quarter of a million orders for the computer.

In 1981, the first IBM personal computer was released with a price point of approximately $1,565. It used Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system. From that moment on, the personal computer market really took off, and millions of people around the world would end up buying them.

Unfortunately, while we have a pretty good idea of the history behind the PC, we don’t know who invented Name Your PC Day. This is a mystery that continues to elude us. As always, we’ll continue to search for this holiday’s origins, but at this point, it doesn’t look like we’ll ever find it.

Observing Name Your PC Day

As the name of this holiday suggests, this is the day for everyone everywhere to name their PC. People who have already done this can use the rest of the day to surf the Internet or play games on their personal computers. For people who haven’t yet named their PCs, this is a day to finally come up with a snappy name for their computer.