Inventing the PC: The MCM/70 Story

225 Pages·2011·3.644 MB·English

by  Zbigniew Stachniak

Inventing the PC
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Zbigniew Stachniak
INVENTING
THE PC
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THE MCM/70 STORY
McGill-Queen’s University Press
Montreal & Kingston | London | Ithaca
© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2011
ISBN 978-0-7735-3852-8
Legal deposit second quarter 2011
Bibliothèque nationale du Québec
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free
(100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian
Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid
to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada
Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the
financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book
Fund for our publishing activities.
Library and Archives Canada
Cataloguing in Publication
Stachniak, Zbigniew, 1953–
Inventing the PC : the MCM/70 story / Zbigniew Stachniak.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7735-3852-8
1. MCM/70 (Computer). 2. Microcomputers – Canada – Design and
construction – History. 3. Computer engineering – Canada – History.
I. Title.
QA76.8.M43S73 2011 004.165 C2011-900297-3
Set in 10/14 Sabon with OCR A
Book design & typesetting by Garet Markvoort, zijn digital
TO THE MAKERS OF THE MCM/70
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CONTENTS
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Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 3
1 At the Beginning, There Were Two 9
2 Inventing the PC 22
3 The Making of the MCM/70 38
A new era in integrated electronics 39
The team 44
From the key-cassette to the M/C prototype 46
MCM/APL 54
The production model of the MCM/70 62
4 Unveiling the Future 65
5 It’s All About Power 80
Too much with too little? 81
Sharing the power – the venture capital way 92
The power supply that blacked out MCM 103
CONTENTS
6 Changing Fortunes 114
I do have a fighting position 117
A revolution of his own 119
Kutt’s last stand 125
Horned angels of hard-pressed entrepreneurs 132
7 The Day After 137
President Berg 138
Recycling the past 143
Williams for Berg 147
An APL machine to the end 151
Conclusions 164
Welcome to the computer age! 166
The MCM/70 personal computer 169
We could have been Apple 175
Why was the MCM/70 forgotten? 182
MCM Timeline 189
Notes 197
Bibliography 203
Index 209
viii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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I wish to express my gratitude to many people who over the
years have contributed to my research on Micro Computer Ma-
chines and who, through their donations, helped to build the
MCM collection at the York University Computer Museum. I
am particularly indebted to Mers Kutt for making his personal
MCM archive available to me, for granting hours of interviews,
and for enduring detailed questioning. To the late Kenneth
Iverson I owe special thanks for the gift of his time and his in-
valuable recollections of APL’s development at IBM.
A great debt of gratitude is due to former MCM employees
who have supported my work through interviews, discussions,
and donations of MCM documents and technical literature.
André Arpin, Cam Farnell, Don Genner, Lorne Gladstone, José
Laraya, Gordon Ramer, Reg Rea, Barrie Robinson, Glen Seeds,
Morgan Smyth, and John Woods have offered not only their
help through meetings and interviews but also their sincere en-
couragement for my MCM project. I wish to acknowledge help-
ful comments received from other former MCM employees and
users of MCM products. Particular thanks go to David Borrow-
man, Ned Chapin, Ted Edwards, Haron Ezer, Mike Jenkins, J.
Maika, Daniel Pimienta, Glenn Schneider, and John Wallace.
For their recollections of early microprocessor development ac-
tivities at Intel I would like to thank Marcian E. Hoff, Jr, Stanley
Mazor, and Hal Feeney. I offer my thanks to William Kindree
for long discussions on the history of the APL programming
language and early mainframe computer industry.