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with teletype … But now, let's build something serious.” Laraya
added, “Mers got the chips and on the basis of that I developed
the rack version … It was very fast from the time we had the
[
SIM
8-01] development board … The software guys could play
with it, we were building a computer now!”
The construction of the new prototype, which began in the
basement of Laraya's house, continued in
KSI
's new research
and development facility. “[We] decided to move just a stone's
throw from my house, to … a new but poorly constructed two-
storey house,” remembered Laraya. The very mention of this
first
KSI
R&D
facility, located on McKey street in Kingston
next to a garbage truck repair facility, made Laraya and every-
body else who worked there laugh. “That place, I'm not sure
how to describe this,” hesitated Arpin,
but that place had been built by a drunk carpenter. And
the floor in the building was really, really sloping, so
much so that we made sure that no more than one person
ever was in the middle of that room. And we used to put
something like six inches of punch cards under the filing
cabinets so that they did not open. [The builder] had two
high-school students building that place when he was sit-
ting in his truck drinking.
The hardware of the new prototype resided on several printed
circuit boards mounted on a minicomputer-sized metal rack.
“I modularized [the hardware],” recalled Laraya. “Here is the
card, we will put the
CPU
here. I think the
CPU
and the dis-
play interface I put on one card. Then, there is memory. I said,
'well, these guys always want more memory,' so I put [a separ-
ate] module for
EPROM
and
RAM
.” The hardware engineering
team built and interfaced an
APL
keyboard with the computer
and included a small single-line plasma display (a Burroughs
