CONCLUSIONS - Inventing the PC - page 169

the early 1970s, high-end, low-priced programmable calcula-
tors from Hewlett-Packard and Wang Laboratories had been
attracting considerable attention from individual professionals
as well as small and medium-sized businesses. Useful computa-
tional tasks could be accomplished on these machines in-house
and more cost-effectively than through logging on to time-
sharing systems. Since these programmable calculators used
dialects of the BASIC programming language, IBM equipped its
5100 computer with both APL and BASIC . MCM , on the other
hand, utterly dismissed the programmable calculator market as
well as the role BASIC had begun to play in research, business,
and education. Looking back, most former key MCM employees
agreed that ignoring BASIC was a major mistake. “ APL was a
good idea,” explained Genner, “but had we decided to go with
BASIC right from the start we would be world leaders now, our
name would still be up there.” Laraya agreed: “We would have
been like Apple … we would be where Apple is right now.”
MCM could not be like Apple Computer since, unlike the
maker of the famous Apple ][ microcomputer, it was cast in
rigid and self-imposed software and hardware constraints dur-
ing most of its corporate existence. Unlike the MCM /70 and
the MCM /700, the Apple ][, introduced during the first West
Coast Computer Fair in San Francisco in April 1977, was truly
inexpensive and could be easily expanded by its users. By mid-
1980, Apple sold over 120,000 of these computers. BASIC most
certainly contributed to the Apple ]['s popularity, as tens of
thousands of useful programs were written for it in BASIC , but
the sudden surge in the computer's sales was caused by the ap-
plication software VisiCalc, written by Personal Software and
offered to the Apple ][ users in 1979. VisiCalc was the first elec-
tronic spreadsheet program and, for a while, it was available
only on Apple ][s. For author Owen Linzmayer, “VisiCalc was
arguably the first 'killer application.' It was so compelling that
people bought [Apple] hardware just to run it. It went on to