Every year, Time magazine selects a personality, an idea or a group of people as its Person of the Year. It used to be ‘Man of the Year' till 1999.
Being featured carries immense prestige as it reflects the difference the selected person made to the world in the year gone by. The list of people who have been named Man of the Year is impressive, and includes the likes of Mahatma Gandhi (1930), Adolf Hitler (1938), Winston Churchill (1940), John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1961), and even people from the world of technology such as Bill Gates (2005), Andy Grove (1997) and Jeff Bezos (1999).
In 1982, the editors of the magazine were spoilt for choice. It had been a year full of numerous events and candidates ranged from Ronald Reagan, Indira Gandhi and Yasser Arafat to Mother Teresa. But the magazine decided that the title of Man of the Year would go to someone (or something) else. Something that did not even breathe, but would still change the way we lived, forever.
Time's Man of the Year in 1982 was the computer-a device that was slowly gaining popularity even though it remained largely restricted to technology followers with deep pockets.
It remains the only object to have earned that appellation in the magazine's history. And the selectors were spot on in choosing it. Twenty-six years later, it is impossible to imagine a world without computers.
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