Book Review: Inventing the PC, The MCM/70 Story Inventing the PC, The MCM/70 Story Book Review by Jim Scheef Did you know that the personal computer was invented in 1973 in Canada? That would be more than a year before the now famous Popular Electronics cover article about the MITS Altair 8800. Author Zbigniew Stachniac has some impressive evidence for this astonishing claim - he was there when it happened. The company was called Micro Computer Machines, or MCM, and was based in Toronto, Canada. The machine was originally based on the Intel 8008 but switched to the 8080 microprocessor (as used in the Altair) and ran APL from ROM. With one or two built-in tape drives for storage the machine was so sophisticated that IBM rushed a competitor to market with almost identical specs (the IBM 5100). For more details on the MCM/70, I refer you to the appropriate article on Wikipedia. So why aren't we using MCM computers today? There seem to be many reasons but my pick would be the fact that MCM developed a case of corporate paralysis that prevented any rational marketing effort and the company focused on Europe rather than the US. The story is an interesting one and the first chapters start with the state of the computer industry in the late '60's when the increasing popularity of mini-computers like the DEC PDP-8 made computers more accessible in business and research. The hobbyists in the San Francisco Bay area were not the only people to realize the potential for a computer that could affordably be dedicated to one person - a personal computer. The story continues with the founding of MCM as a company to develop such a machine, but unfortunately, as the chapters unfold, the book becomes almost impossible to read. This book will interest hard-core computer historians and possibly APL (a programming language - really!) enthusiasts as there is a sub-story about how APL became the language built into the computer. The computers that did sell went primarily to organizations engaged in actuarial and statistical analysis where APL shines. It's always really fun and refreshing to find a newly published book on the history of the computer industry, and especially about a computer hitherto completely unknown. The book is available from Amazon, Walmart and abebooks.com. Because it is still in print, the book is not available at the normally steep discounts to which we are accustomed.
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