It’s All About Power - Inventing the PC - page 78

Chicago show, was powered by the new microprocessor, re-
placing the older 8008 chip inside the Micral N, shown just a
few months earlier during the SICOB exhibit in Paris.
MCM is position on the 8080 issue is rather puzzling. The man-
agers were aware of the superiority of the new chip from Intel
over the 8008 processor currently employed in the MCM /70.
And, for a short period of time, the company seemed to be com-
mitted to the development of the 8080-based successor to the
MCM /70. Some, like Laraya and Kutt, were strong proponents
of microprocessor technology. In notes taken during the 24
April managers' meeting, Kutt wrote that the company should
start work on the 8080 based machine as soon as possible.
However, for others, MCM 's future was with more traditional
computer hardware technologies. Kutt strongly disagreed: “Yes,
this [8008 microprocessor] is slow but the next version, and the
next version are coming and we wouldn't have to do much [to
adapt them].”
During the 24 May managers' meeting, Ramer agreed to in-
vestigate and write a report on how the company might begin
manufacturing the next generation of its computers by 1975.
These computers were to be at least ten times faster than the
MCM /70 and capable of driving a multi-line display and using
floppy disk drives for virtual memory and storage. In his re-
port Micro Computer Machines: Development Policy , Ramer
sketched two possible hardware development paths leading to
“a range of personal low-cost APL computers capable of driv-
ing a variety of peripherals, assuming and maintaining a leader-
ship in this market niche created by the introduction of the
MCM /70.”
From an overall point of view, both paths looked the same:
they both originated with the MCM /70, went through the
MCM /77 computer as an intermediate step, and ended with
the MCM /170 hardware. The MCM /77 was to be the ten times
faster refinement of the MCM /70. The greater data-handling ca-