The Making of the MCM/70 - Inventing the PC - page 52

They ran simulations on it and they were quite successful.
… They used to rent the [computing] time on I.P. Sharp
[Associates' time-sharing system] before that. It cost them
a fortune. They were able to move their code over [to their
MCM /70]. They had to adjust it but … it wasn't that dras-
tic an adjustment. It [ MCM /70] ran slow … [but] they only
had to run it once a day. So, those people who were spend-
ing, I think, hundreds of dollars an hour on the [I.P. Sharp
Associates] computer, were suddenly paying 5,000 dollars
for the machine that would do that [simulation]; and they
would recover the costs extremely quickly.
The computers used by commercial time-sharing companies,
such as I.P. Sharp Associates of Toronto, were, of course, much
larger and much faster than the MCM /70. But the response
time of these computers, which sat in air-conditioned computer
rooms, depended on the number of users remotely connected to
them at any given time. Unless a user was prepared to connect
to a time-sharing system outside normal business hours, the
MCM /70 was actually more cost-effective for typical business
tasks. It allowed continuous, twenty-four-hour-a-day access to
computing resources at fixed computing costs. In comparison
with a time-sharing system, an MCM /70's use did not require
signing on, dialling a telephone, or entering an account num-
ber. Its dedicated use didn't require communications links, and
hence wasn't affected by line-noise and line-drops which, for
users of time-sharing systems, could wreck their computer ses-
sions. MCM /70 users could develop and run dedicated software,
and they could afford to take breaks as there was no need to
hurry through terminal sessions to do as much work per con-
nect hour as possible to save costs.
The MCM /70's ROM contained not only the APL language in-
terpreter but also its operating system, comprised of AVS and
EASY (which stands for External Allocation SYstem). The