The Making of the MCM/70 - Inventing the PC - page 46

we went around to a law firm in downtown Toronto and met
with a bunch of senior lawyers there … Mers was gonna try
to get some venture capital.” It was most likely in the office of
Borden, Elliot, Kelly & Palmer, Barristers and Solicitors, where
Kutt, holding the cardboard look-alike of the future MCM /70
in his hands, exclaimed, “This is what it's going to look like!”
And they believed him. Kutt and Smyth left the law office with
a promise of a large investment in MCM .
MCM/APL
The development of APL software for the MCM /70 computer
was the most challenging aspect of the personal computer pro-
ject at MCM . After all, the success of the future MCM /70 in
the marketplace would depend not so much on its novel hard-
ware makeup, which might excite the technical press, as on how
useful and user-friendly it would become. And that meant writ-
ing quality software for a microprocessor characterized by low
speed and a restricted set of instructions. That also meant com-
pressing APL into a useful dialect which, when implemented,
could fit into the limited memory space of the computer. “The
fact that we were able to do this,” commented Glen Seeds, who
joined MCM in June 1973, “led directly to the name of our
implementation [of the APL language]. IBM 's version was of-
ficially titled ' APL \360', and was intended to be read as ' APL
expands the ( IBM ) 360 (system).' APL ers will recognize this as
a pun on the 'expand' operator '\'. Taking our cue from this, we
called ours ' MCM / APL ', to be read as ' MCM compresses APL '.” 8
The work on the APL language for the MCM /70 began in
early 1972, when KSI was still waiting for Intel to make the
8008 chip and its documentation available to the electronics in-
dustry, and months before the final hardware architecture of the
MCM /70 was drawn up. The team that was developing the APL
language - Ramer, Genner, and Smyth - had worked together