Changing Fortunes - Inventing the PC - page 127

Dorsey incorporated Micom Data Systems, which manufac-
tured a successful line of Micom digital word processors and
was eventually sold to Philips.
The circumstances at MCM and AES which led to their found-
ers' leaving their respective companies under pressure from
venture capital groups were certainly different. But doesn't the
Dorsey versus Innocean case show that Kutt (using his own
words) still had a fighting position? that on 25 October he could
have salvaged more than just some portion of his investment in
MCM ? Was $150,000 received from Elliot for his shares worth
giving up the idea of starting MCM International or some other
computer company to manufacture PC s? After all, MCM was
not too keen on building another computer around a micro-
processor, while Kutt, Laraya, and others at MCM were strongly
convinced that microprocessor-based hardware was the future
of the computer industry. Within a year, Kutt could have had
a PC more advanced than the MCM /70 and without many of
the expensive and complex hardware features introduced to
the MCM /70 to compensate for the slow speed and rudiment-
ary architecture of the 8008 microprocessor. The use of a new
8-bit microprocessor would have eliminated the need for virtual
memory and allowed the use of floppy drives for external stor-
age instead of slow cassette drives employed in the MCM /70.
Finally, he could have protected his rights to manufacture
non- APL computers; both Laraya and Rea were proponents of
the BASIC programming language. In the 1970s, the BASIC pro-
gramming language, developed by John Kemeny and Thomas
Kurtz at Dartmouth College in the early 1960s, was becoming
one of the software standards accepted by both the small sys-
tems industry and individual users. Although BASIC was dis-
missed by some as an inconsequential little programming toy,
and was even considered harmful by others, it was unquestion-
ably becoming widely popular; it was easy to learn, easy to use,