The Day After - Inventing the PC - page 146

MCM /900 computer
marketing brochure,
1978. (Source: York
University Computer
Museum.)
chip was, was a challenging task that required a great deal of
expertise. In the end, the MCM / APL interpreter developed for
the MCM /70 was slow (a consequence of the instruction set,
speed, and memory addressing limitations of the 8008), but
APL 's efficient syntax made the language a suitable choice for
this computer and its /700 refinement.
But that was in 1972. In 1979, APL 's popularity was already
coming to a standstill, and MCM 's commitment to APL should
have been re-evaluated. Other programming languages such as
BASIC , Fortran 77, C, and Pascal were still gaining in popular-
ity, and some MCM employees were of the opinion that tying
MCM products exclusively to APL was becoming a major ob-
stacle to capturing enough of the small systems market for the
company to grow. “One of the things that hurt MCM was APL .