Unveiling the Future - Inventing the PC - page 70

there were about fifteen prospective universities in Canada and
seventy-five in the United States. To attract them to its products,
MCM developed special educational presentations. One of these,
delivered by Edwards in October at the University of Toronto as
part of the university's “Small Computer Seminars,” brought a
record turnout of 115 people and, according to the organizers,
was an outstanding success. Some university professors wrote
to MCM expressing their direct interest in the MCM hardware:
“ APL is currently used in all of our introductory courses so that
the potential for systems like yours at Yale is very high,” wrote
Martin H. Schultz, Professor of Computer Science at Yale Uni-
versity, in November 1973. By 1976, an estimated 27.5 per cent
of the MCM systems sold in North America went to educational
institutions.
Before the year's end, the MCM /70 was displayed at one more
computer show. The Canadian Computer Show & Conference
( CCSC ) was organized for the first time in 1969 by the Can-
adian Information Processing Society under the presidency of
Mers Kutt himself. In 1973, the combined computer show and
conference took place in Toronto from 16 to 18 October, and
was already Canada's premier computer event. “Among new ex-
hibitors [at CCSC ] will be an old face,” reported The Financial
Post on 29 September, “that of Mers Kutt, ex-president of Con-
solidated Computers Ltd, whose new company, Micro Com-
puter Machines Inc., will be showing a Kutt-invented world
first: a complete battery-operated computer-in-a-briefcase, with
cassette storage.” In fact, at CCSC , MCM would exhibit two
models of the MCM /70: the desktop and the Executive versions.
The MCM products attracted steady attention throughout the
exhibition period at CCSC . It was gratifying for Kutt to read
reviews in post-show commentaries of not only the MCM /70
but also of two new key-edit systems exhibited by his former
company, Consolidated Computer.