Unveiling the Future - Inventing the PC - page 69

The message delivered during the press conferences was
simple but powerful. MCM intended to make the world's first
portable APL computer “of a size, price and ease-of-use as to
bring personal computer ownership to business, education and
scientific users previously unserved by the computer industry.” 12
MCM 's promotional brochures explained that the MCM /70
would
bridge the gap between the sophisticated calculators that
offer simplicity of operation but fail to provide the infor-
mation processing capabilities of the computer … and the
large and complex mainframe computers that require such
high degrees of training and experience as to place them
beyond the operational capabilities of most people who
want to use them. 13
For business and scientific use, the MCM /70 offered a low-cost
APL programming environment. For educational purposes,
MCM promised the ' MCM /70 Classroom' - an environment
that would provide each student with his or her own individ-
ualized interactive computer. MCM recognized that in the early
1970s, one of the main obstacles to advancing the use of com-
puters in education was the high cost of computer equipment.
According to MCM , the most effective system would be one
which allowed each student to use a separate terminal to enter
into direct and interactive communication with the computer.
MCM estimated that the use of the MCM /70s as stand-alone
terminals could reduce computing costs to just 25¢ per student
hour versus the $25 cost of a typical academic terminal-based
time-sharing system.
In his early analysis of the academic market, Kutt looked pri-
marily at the IBM System\360 users, who might benefit from
the smaller and much cheaper APL system. He estimated that