It’s All About Power - Inventing the PC - page 80

veloped, but all application programs written for the MCM /70
would work on both of the new micros. The MCM /170 would
not be significantly different from the /77 apart from some in-
ternal software to allow the use of more peripherals.
On the other hand, the second path assumed that the CPU s of
the /77 and /170 computers would, informally speaking, be still
like the 8008 but faster. (For more technically oriented read-
ers: these CPU s were to be hardware emulations of the 8008
instruction set.) Such CPU s could be built even of discrete TTL
(transistor-transistor logic) components. According to Ramer's
calculations, the speed gains over the MCM /70 were a factor
of ten for the /77 and of 100 for the /170 computer. While the
/77 would work under the MCM /70 software, the /170 model
would require a new version of the APL / AVs / EASY suite.
There is one more significant difference between the two
paths. While the non-8080 approach continues toward yet an-
other computer - the MCM /80, predicted to be 1,000 times faster
than the MCM /70 - the 8080 path ends with the MCM /170.
This indicated Ramer's uncertainty regarding the fate of micro-
processor development at Intel. According to Ramer, it would
be the MCM /80's role to “place MCM in a position where the
Company can maintain the leadership in the field of personal-
ized computers.”
In Ramer's opinion, MCM 's product development policies
should have been based on the principle that the design of each
new product would “take optimal advantage of the develop-
ment effort of preceding products while heading as directly as
possible to the Company's objectives.” In this context, he ex-
plicitly endorsed the non-8080 approach to future hardware
development, emphasizing that it was more “evolutionary”; the
transformation of the MCM /70 into the /77 model could reuse
as much hardware and software of the MCM /70 as possible,
including the MCM APL / AVS / EASY software.
But Ramer's argument for abandoning the 8080 path was not
without its flaws. The reason for building the MCM /70 around