Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
By June of 1969, Kutt was out of Queen's and devoting all
his time to
CCI
. That year he was also elected president of the
Canadian Information Processing Society. But the satisfac-
tion of having a breakthrough product and getting a taste of
managing a successful company did not last long. In the fall of
1971, he was squeezed out of
CCI
for reasons best explained
in a separate publication. (One would have to deal with a vast
range of issues, from raising and managing large capital to the
incompetence of some top bureaucrats in the Canadian federal
government, to name just two.) That year, he was also struck by
personal tragedy. A few months before his departure from
CCI
,
he lost his wife to cancer.
It was also in the fall of 1971 that Kutt started to focus all his
technical and entrepreneurial expertise on a new invention - a
desktop
APL
computer. Several factors shaped the new direc-
tion of his interest and the process of this computer's invention.
Yes, Kutt had indeed created a better computing environment
at Queen's University, but the
APL
terminals connected to the
shared
IBM
\360 computer were still slow as they had to share
the computer's resources. Things would be different entirely if
they could be turned into stand-alone computers. Yes, his Key-
Edit system did away entirely with punch cards, but it could
be improved considerably if the key-stations became more in-
dependent, a bit like little computers themselves. And finally,
there was the
APL
programming language and the microproces-
sor. For Kutt, there could be only one result of the integration
of all these factors: a microprocessor-based desktop computer
running
APL
. “I knew that this was going to be a computer
of the future,” explained Kutt, “and [with] one per person, no
need to time share. And on the way there,
APL
- such a power-
ful language … I saw what
APL
did to the university.”
Since the incorporation of
KSI
, Kutt had been keeping de-
tailed design notes documenting his microcomputer project.
From these documents it is possible to reconstruct the main fea-