[GTALUG] MCM/70 computer

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: phiscock at ee.ryerson.ca

| If it had a BASIC interpreter, it might have done better.

It had a one-line (plasma) display.  APL is definitely the right choice
if you can only see one line of a program at once.

| And a power
| supply that didn't catch fire ;).

Fairly crucial.

The article doesn't mention minicomputers.  They were in their hayday
when the MCM/70 came out.  Comparing it to mainframes is really
unfortunate.

The MCM/70 was an unbelievable proof-of-concept.  The 8008 was such a
miserable processor that it is astonishing that APL would fit.

The box was not Good Enough for me at the time.  But that doesn't veto
success: neither were the Altair 8080 nor the Apple II were good
enough, but the hunger was great enough that a market was created and
the products quickly evolved.  Too bad the MCM/70 didn't catch such a
wave.

(Altair power supplies were horrible too.  My Altair works because I
stuck an pop-can-sized capacitor from Active Surplus on it with
alligator clips (you can tell that I'm a software guy).)

No copies of York APL are known to exist.  I once had a listing that I
was using as scrap paper.  I couldn't find it by the time I found out
about this problem.

York's Zbigniew Stachniak (mentioned in the article) has a museum at York 
and hosted several interesting talks.  I haven't heard of any recently -- 
I've probably fallen off the mailing list.