Unveiling the Future - Inventing the PC - page 59

device. “Ted used it on the plane to work on the presentation he
was delivering in Copenhagen,” added Seeds.
The man who brought the MCM /70 to Copenhagen was Ted
Edwards. A glance through the congress proceedings reveals
that Edwards wrote his APL paper for presentation at the con-
gress as an employee of Control Data Canada ( CDC ). 4 However,
by the time the conference proceedings were printed, Edwards
had left CDC to join MCM . Almost thirty years later, Edwards
described his move to MCM as a rather unusual professional
opportunity:
I moved to Toronto in 1970 to take a position with Con-
trol Data Canada in charge of developing an APL inter-
preter for the CDC STAR , then the world's “largest” com-
puter. By Spring of 1973, APL * STAR was up and running
and documented, ready for release. Unfortunately, it was
the only STAR software that was. Rather than go to work
on COBOL (fate worse that death for an APL er), I and two
of my guys, Jim Litchfield and Glen Seeds, left CDC to go
to MCM . After all, after doing an APL for the world's lar-
gest computer, what was one to do other than an APL for
the world's smallest, the Intel 8008? 5
According to Edwards, it was his idea to pack an MCM /70 into
an attaché case. “I was already committed to deliver a paper at
the 1973 Copenhagen APL conference when I joined MCM and
had the idea of building a machine into an attaché case with
some batteries. I figured that it would certainly attract some
attention and indeed, it did.”
As was the case with the MCM 's main product, the making of
the computer-in-a-briefcase, or the MCM /70 Executive as it was
later called, was a team effort. “We all worked on it and we all
stayed up late trying to get him [Edwards] on the plane,” said
Laraya. “We got a Grand & Toy briefcase, just the right size.