The Making of the MCM/70 - Inventing the PC - page 37

Arpin would play one of the key roles in designing the
memory management system for the MCM /70 computer. He
came to KSI from St. Lawrence College in Kingston where, in
mid-1972, Ramer assumed the directorship of the college's com-
puter centre. Asked about his path to joining KSI , Arpin replied,
He [Ramer] talked to me and showed me the [8008] chip.
And I remember bringing that thing up home. That thing
had a tiny little document, right? There was nothing to it,
a few pages, I don't know, maybe 30-40 pages … it was
small. And I sat down and I read the description and I just
marveled at that piece of hardware. I could not believe
that such a chip could exist.
Arpin, like many before him, had been indulging in pipe dreams
about his own home computer for quite some time.
When I was teaching at St. Lawrence [College], I remem-
ber, I was talking to students and I said to them “in ten
years from now,” and that was before I even knew any-
thing about the 8008, “in ten years from now, I will have
my own computer.” And the students thought that I was
completely out of my skull … And really, the year after - I
had one. And when I was predicting “ten years,” I thought
I was optimistic. I had worked with the PDP -8 [computers
before] and, in my view, I thought that the PDP -8 would
be something which would get cheap enough [that, even-
tually,] I would be able to afford one at home.
After detailed study of the 8008's documentation, Arpin dis-
covered one worrisome problem with the chip's design: its poor
handling of the so-called interrupts, the mechanism for tempor-
arily halting the microprocessor's operations. “I remember de-
scribing that to Gord. And we agreed: 'Well, there is a problem,