It’s All About Power - Inventing the PC - page 96

volume manufacturing of its computer. The company was still
searching for a supplier of ROM s with the MCM /70's software
programmed into them. The new computer case needed some
final design touches, and the electric motor that was to oper-
ate the cassette drive of the computer proved to be inadequate.
Finally, the machine was awaiting a new power supply. Under
normal conditions, all these problems could have been resolved
within eight to ten weeks. And most of them were. Unfortu-
nately, the computer's power supply, whose design, testing, re-
design, and retesting dragged on for months, became one of the
factors that brought the MCM /70 project to the verge of col-
lapse in the second half of 1974.
The answer to the question of what went wrong with the
power supply project seems to be more complex than the power
supply itself, and to tackle it, one has to go back to mid-1973
and the second wave of MCM 's recruitment efforts. In retro-
spect, one of Kutt's biggest mistakes on the hiring front was the
job offer made to Edward (Ted) Murray Edwards in July 1973,
soon after the APL Conference in Toronto. It was not because
Edwards lacked professional competence. On the contrary, he
was a gifted and knowledgeable individual who had a Master's
degree in Science from the University of British Columbia and a
fair share of experience in the academic as well as the business
world. He was a first-rate APL er, too. In 1971 he joined Control
Data Canada ( CDC ) in Mississauga, Ontario, and by the fol-
lowing year he was responsible for all APL implementation ac-
tivities for Control Data Corporation, CDC 's parent company.
He and his team at CDC were developing APL * STAR software
for Control Data Corporation's Star series computers. But the
Star hardware project was on rather shaky ground and, in spite
of good progress on APL * STAR 's implementation, Edwards'
group was to be reassigned to another project that he was less
than enthusiastic about. In May of 1973, at the APL conference