The Day After - Inventing the PC - page 151

almost depleted. By the end of the 1970s, MCM was out of step
with the industry, relying on outdated bit-slice CPU technology,
and vanishing in the APL quicksand of MCM 's own making.
“I could see the way things were going,” commented Woods in
an interview. But he could not change everything at once. His
short-term objective was to keep the company afloat by concen-
trating on current MCM customers.
I didn't think we were going to get too many new users.
The biggest success that I could see was the software that
was already established. Because people didn't really want
to write anything new in APL . In the spring of 1980 I
made a presentation to the Board reviewing the success of
the past, the current evolution of the industry and a strat-
egy for the future. Bruce Wallace commented that he was
glad to see that someone had eventually figured out a plan
for the future. Because before that they were in the dark as
to what the heck is gonna happen to this company.
The board gave Woods a free hand to rescue MCM , and he came
up with the development and financing strategies to do the job.
First, he needed a new computer to replace the MCM /900. “We
made money on hardware, not software,” commented Woods.
“I had to get more hardware out the door.” Application soft-
ware, developed outside of MCM , was seen as a tool enabling
MCM to sell more computers. What Woods wanted was simple:
to see the MCM /900 technology evolve into a multi-user, dis-
tributed data-processing network that shared peripherals and a
common file system (residing on a hard drive). The network was
planned to support up to eight work stations and to be inter-
faced with a large variety of peripherals. Such a system “gave
organizations a step forward as they grew,” explained Woods.
The new MCM computer was announced in mid-1980. “We had
to call it something different, and 'Power' rather appealed to