The Day After - Inventing the PC - page 154

The board didn't resist and, as of January 1982, Woods was in
possession of two-thirds of MCM common shares. “The board
saw the writing on the wall and they knew if I didn't do it, they
were dead any way.”
MCM made some money in 1980 - $244,000 on revenues
of $1.9 million. The new MCM computers were displayed at
various shows including the COMPEC '80 computer show in
London, and a British firm, BL Systems Ltd, was appointed to
distribute them in the United Kingdom. Then came 1981, when
hardware sales stalled. Neither the MCM /900 nor the Power
were able to gain the general acceptance that other personal and
desktop microprocessor-powered computers, such as the small
Apple ][ running the VisiCalc spreadsheet program, had begun
to enjoy since the end of the 1970s. To make things worse, on
12 August, IBM introduced yet another desktop - the Personal
Computer ( PC ). The speed with which the PC began to change
the face of personal and office computing caught not only
MCM but the majority of other microcomputer manufactur-
ers off guard. In the not-so-distant future, most manufacturers
of home and business desktop computers who could not adapt
to the rapidly evolving PC world would perish. To make ends
meet, MCM became a distributor for Sanyo microcomputers - a
rather humbling turn of events for a company whose engineer-
ing and entrepreneurial talent had been sculpting the features of
the world's first personal computers a decade earlier.
By 1982, MCM was unable to raise any new funds through
bank loans or grants from either the Ontario government or the
federal Department of Industry, Trade and Commerce. On 11
March, Robertson resigned as MCM 's director. Then, in May,
a British group of potential investors backed out. “The major
stumbling block to my European investor was that at the crucial
time, everyone became greedy and I was unable to negotiate
what the investors considered to be a 'reasonable' buy-out cost
to clear the topics,” said Woods. “When the inancing dropped