Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The shortcut to demo drawing. (Source: M. Kutt's archive.)
tial distributors of
KSI
's products. In his notes, Kutt sketches a
“shortcut to demo” and estimates its completion by early June
of 1972. The
M
/
C
demonstrator, as it is referred to in Kutt's
notes, was to consist of a single
CPU
and memory board and
a power supply, packed into a desktop calculator-like case fea-
turing a built-in keyboard and a small display. It would offer
basic hardware with just enough software stored in
ROM
to
demonstrate the way the 8008 could handle a subset of
APL
. It
is not clear whether such a minimum-hardware demonstrator
was ever constructed. If it was, it would have been the work of
José Laraya, who was hired to lead the hardware development
of the
APL
computer.
José Laraya was born in the Philippines. He studied mechanical
engineering at the University of the Philippines and, between
1962 and 1967, electronics engineering at Tokyo University. In
1967, he moved to Canada to work as a computer hardware en-
gineer at Queen's University, at the very time when Kutt was the
director of the Queen's computing centre. Laraya didn't work
for Kutt's Consolidated Computer, but in 1971, when Kutt and
Ramer were putting together the nucleus of their computer, he
decided to leave Queen's for
KSI
, lured by Kutt's idea of build-
ing an
APL
computer around the Intel 8008 chip. “I had done
work in semiconductors in Japan … And I was very up to what
