At the Beginning, There Were Two - Inventing the PC - page 10

Mers Kutt and Gordon Ramer were devoted converts to APL .
It was Kutt who, in his capacity as the director of the Queen's
Computing Centre, invited Iverson to deliver his 1968 lecture.
Both Kutt and Ramer appreciated the language's strengths:
its expressive power and the compactness and simplicity of its
syntax. What wasn't clear to Ramer - yet! - was by what magic
of hardware engineering a small and inexpensive computer,
such as the one envisioned by Kutt, could function with suf-
ficient power and memory to execute APL programs. In 1971,
APL was commercially available only on mainframe comput-
ers, and for good reason: these machines were fast and could be
equipped with enough memory to support multiple APL users.
Of course, mainframes were also very big and very expensive.
And now Kutt wanted his computer to be not only tiny and
cheap but also APL programmable!
While chatting with Kutt about the technical specifications
of Intel's 8008 microprocessor, Ramer was deeply skeptical, at
first, about building an APL computer around the 8008 chip.
“First time we met,” recollected Kutt, “he [Ramer] thought
that I was from another world … putting APL into that? No
way!” What was worse, Kutt could not even present a sample
of the 8008 chip to Ramer. At the time of their meeting in fall
1971, the processor was still in development and wouldn't be
available on the market until April of the following year. Kutt
could, however, disclose the device's specifications: its process-
ing speed and the amount of memory with which the processor
could directly operate. “Mers had a vision of APL running on
this Intel 8008 chip,” recalled Ramer, “and that took a very
big leap of faith in those days, because this was an eight-bit
machine which chugged away at some incredibly slow speed.”
Looking at the Intel 8008's specifications, Ramer's main
concern, apart from the low processing speed of the chip, was
the insufficient amount of memory the processor could operate
with directly - just 16K (kilobytes). The popular APL \360 lan-