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Hardware

30th Anniversary of the Microcomputer 249

Posted by michael from the not-even-a-real-country-anyway dept.
FreezerJam writes "The Toronto Star is running an article on the 30th anniversary of the launch of the MCM/70, the first personal computer, complete with tape drive and APL programming environment. For those of you checking your timeline, this is over a year before the article on the Altair 8800 was published. Microcomputers? Blame Canada!" There's also a story in the Globe and Mail.
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30th Anniversary of the Microcomputer More

30th Anniversary of the Microcomputer

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  • Video Game History, eh? (Score:5, Funny)

    by daeley ( 126313 ) * on Thursday September 25, 2003 @01:22PM (#7056159) Homepage
    It packed a fair bit of power for such a small computer. It could solve complex mathematical problems and, when the work was done, run simple video games.

    The most famous game, of course, consisted of two small paddles on screen: one a forward on a breakaway, the other a goalie, and a little square of light going back and forth. Yes, who could ever forget the classic "Puckong"?

  • Riihiihiihiiiight!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by zoloto ( 586738 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @01:22PM (#7056163)

    "I got tennis elbow from lugging the thing around from one country to another," Kutt recalled

    Sure buddy, blame it on the computer

  • Blasphemy I tell you! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Max Romantschuk ( 132276 ) <max@romantschuk.fi> on Thursday September 25, 2003 @01:23PM (#7056171) Homepage
    The Altair was the one true first personal computer, I will not submit to this blasphemy!

    *proceeding to read the article*...
    • Sometimes, historical facts challenge our cherished views of reality. The first microcomputer is the MCM/70, not the Altair 8800, but many engineers want to believe that the Altair 8800 is the first microcomputer.

      The field of microprocessors has a similar controversy. Intel frequently portrays itself as the inventor of the microprocessor because, supposedly, Ted Hoff and Frederico Faggin invented it when they were Intel employees.

      In 1978, the United States Patent Office (USPTO) granted Texas Instrument

  • Just goes to show... (Score:4, Funny)

    by petermdodge ( 710869 ) <petermdodge&canada,com> on Thursday September 25, 2003 @01:23PM (#7056173) Homepage
    Just goes to show that Canada *did* contribute to the computer industry before Bioware cropped up :)

  • No, no, no, no... This is WRONG! (Score:5, Funny)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @01:25PM (#7056189) Journal
    Lies, all lies.

    Apple invented the personal computer.

    Apple invented the GUI.

    Apple invented the mouse.

    Apple invented the disk drive.

    Apple invented the CD burner.

    Apple invented the DVD burner.

    Apple invented the mp3 player.

    Apple invented the LCD monitor.

    Apple invented BSD Unix (with OSX)

    Apple invented the idea of paying money for music online.

    My mac owning friend assures me this is all true, and anyone who tells you different is a dirty liar!

  • Blame Canada... (Score:2, Informative)

    by NumLk ( 709027 )
    In fact, the MCM/70 could be described as the Avro Arrow of computing history. It was truly ahead of its time and showed lots of promise, but never quite took off because, at least in part, it was made in Canada

    The computer, brought to you by the same country that brought you Hockey, beer, and cheap healthcare, the staples of American life!

    • Hey, at least the Frankfurter is still all American.

      KFG

  • Ahhh... 30 years? That's nothing (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 25, 2003 @01:27PM (#7056204)
    My PDP 11/20, which I still power up occasionally is older than that.
    My 1977 PDP 11/34a, circa 1976, still runs BSD 2.9 just fine

    Ahhh...you young people with yer Gooey applications... When I was young we were REAL men and toggled in the bootstrap with front panel switches and loaded the OS with paper tape.

    Thomas
    • I, too have bootstrapped a PDP machine, a PDP-8, to be exact. A friend of mine got it, and I remember that we reverently entered into the log book that it came with the change of location, and the first booting. Too many people have no sense of history!

      ttyl
      Farrell
      • Too many people have no sense of history!

        Nope.

        Too many revisionists around. Each spouting their own political version of history.

        It is not too bad here, as there are many people which jump on obvious lies/fallacies. But then you read wrong history on news sites, such as "MicroSoft invented X".

        Oh sorry, that would be "innovated".....

  • December 1961 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RobotWisdom ( 25776 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @01:27PM (#7056208) Homepage
    My Minivac 601 [cedmagic.com] could play tictactoe using its six relays. Fortysecond anniversary approaching...

  • Undeserved recognition (Score:5, Informative)

    by Damn_Canuck ( 702128 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @01:29PM (#7056222) Journal
    Unfortunately, some of what the article says is true: many great Canadian inventors do not get the recognition that they deserve. It appears that Mr. Kutt had created the first computer, which was great.

    How many other people do know that a Canadian doctor was the first man to map sections of the brain that indicate smell and other senses in an order to discover what causes seizures? (For the Canadians on here think: "Doctor, I smell burnt toast!")

    There are many others worldwide who, unfortunately, do not get the recognition they so richly deserve because companies with more money and power take all of the credit and force the creators into obscurity around their own inventions. This is actually a great story about how an inventor, even though it was 30 years later, is finally receiving the recognition he so richly deserved.

    • Re:Undeserved recognition (Score:4, Funny)

      by realdpk ( 116490 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @01:35PM (#7056279) Homepage Journal
      If it's so bad, maybe they should all move to the US, where everyone gets proper recognition for their actions. It's perfection down here I tells ya.
    • The first PERSONAL computer, of course. No small feat, but don't forget Babbage, Von Neumann, and Turing.
    • You can't win you know. As soon as he gets his due recongnition America will just co-opt him as our own.

      We did it with Alexander Graham Bell, Albert Einstein and Werner Von Braun.

      How many Americans know that the great man, Michael J. Fox, is actually a Canadian?

      Ok, bad example, but it's the thought that counts.

      KFG
    • Here's my top ten list of Canadian inventions:

      10. The toonie (Two dollar coin with the punch out centre).
      9. The Paint Roller.
      8. Trivial Pursuit.
      7. Tracer Bullets.
      6. Dental Mirrors.
      5. Superman.
      4. The anti-G suit for pilots.
      3. Goalie Masks.
      2. Duct Tape.
      1. Handles on cardboard beer cases.

      myke

      • We also made the first jet airliner [avroarrow.org] in North America, and for a while had the fastest, nastiest jet fighter [kingston.net] in the world. To the day he died my Dad never forgave them for that one...

        I remember reading about one of the local startups trying to raise some money from the banks. The banks demanded collateral and the company proudly showed them 20 copies of their product, worth $2000 each. The banks sneered "That's a box of floppy discs. It's worth $10. Go away."

        ...laura

  • I stared thinking... which personal computers were ever made based on the 8008? The Altair is obvious, and now I know of the MCM/70. But I can't seem to recall anything else. (OK, I was born late 79, might be relevant ;)

    If I've understood corretly the IBM PC bas based on the 8016 (might be wrong here), so no help there.

    What computers are there based on the 8008?
    • The original IBM PC was based on, I think, the 8088 - an 8-bit bus version of the 8086 running at 4.77 MHz.

      But... That was in 1981! As usual, IBM slept right through the personal computer revolution, but then caught up quite well. Seeing the sentence

      ...never did achieve the status of such competitors as International Business Machines Corp. and Apple Computer Inc.

      in 1979, everyone would have laughed out loud.

      There actually was something like a personal computer from IBM before the PC, a thingy cal

      • Seems APL was popular them, even though you needed a special keyboard.

        Very much so. One of the few interpreted languages around at the time, and very powerful particularly for numerical stuff (think "Perl for numbers"). IBM and Burroughs both had mainframe based versions of it, one of the few timesharing (interactive) options. As for the special keyboard, the usual solution was a set of stickers to put on a normal keyboard, and swap out the typeball on the 2741 (or equivalent) terminal to print them.
    • which personal computers were ever made based on the 8008? The Altair is obvious,

      Well, there were a ton of clones of the Altair, to some degree of "cloneness" (eg S100 bus, etc). The IMSAI was an Altair lookalike but with cooler front panel switches that looked more like a PDP's than the cheap toggles on the Altair. There was the SOL-20, which put the mobo in the same box as a keyboard. Come to think of it, though, most of the boxes were based on the later 8080 (or its successor, the Z80) chip. The
      • BTW, IBM's first personal computer was also an APL (and/or BASIC, depending on options) machine. The IBM 5100, built in tape drive and tiny screen, your choice of hardwired APL and/or BASIC.
        I remember my father bringing home the 5110, basically the same computer as the 5100. You switched between the BASIC and APL modes using a big switch on the front. Got to love a 50-pound, 32k portable.

        I learned how to program on that baby. Those were the days.

        • My dad brought home an IBM 5100 a few times from work for the weekend for us to fool with. It had a cool version of Star Trek on it. It also had a BASIC program that made the line printer print a pattern that played out the William Tell Overture with the sound of the printing.

          Back in 1976 it was a cool machine. It had the APL/BASIC switch on it, too. They were available in a single language version, too.

          $10,000 was a lot of money back then.

    • Re:What else is based on the 8008? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Arker ( 91948 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @02:14PM (#7056630) Homepage

      It was actually used in a number of different designs.

      It was designed as a terminal controller for CTC (later became Datapoint) but it seems they never actually used it. According to this post [interesting-people.org] it was developed not by Intel but by CTC themselves, for use in the Datapoint 2200 [old-computers.com], which however wound up shipping without it and never used it. A firm called Traf-O-Data is said to have used it in a microcomputer designed to record highway traffic flow. The same year that this Canadian micro came out (1973), a French company called R2E used this in their Micral-N [old-computers.com] which has been credited as the first commercial, non-kit microcomputer. In the US, Scelbi Computer Consulting Company used it in Scelbi 8h, credited with being the first microcomputer available in the US. It was used in the Mark-8 [old-computers.com] micro, a design that was never mass produced but built instead by hobbyists from a published design - it appears less than 400 of them were ever made. MITS, described by one source as a dying calculator company, but apparently the same MITS that brought out the Altair a few years later, is said to have bought a large batch of them from Intel, planning to revive their business by building a large batch of cheap microcomputers with it, but I can't find any reference to them ever actually selling a computer based on this chip. Might be an interesting story for someone with the time to track it down. The NBI Hantu [old-computers.com] word processor used this chip.

      Well that's enough for me, if you're interested this post should give you a ton of keywords to search for more data on.

      • 2003-01-15 12:05:02 30th anniversary of the Microcomputer (articles,news) (rejected) (about the Micral-N)

        Rule 4 for story submissions: don't post anything about inventions not made in America (non-francophone Canada counts with reluctance) ;-)

    • I can't think of any others based on the 8008. It just barely enough processor to do anything; I think it was targeted as a calculator processor, not a general purpose CPU. The 8080, which ran the original Altair, was a better all around chip which found itself in most of the early micros, followed by the 6800 (Motorola), 6502 (MOS), Z80 (Zilog, source and mostly binary compatible with the 8080, but twice as many registers and an expanded instruction set), and eventually the 8088 that IBM used.
    • The 8008 [dotpoint.com] was an 18-pin chip. I bought one for $125 when it first came out, and it was a royal pain to use, since the address, data, and startup mode were all folded onto the same pins. But when you added eight 1K DRAMs and all the glue logic, the computer was quite sophisticated. I don't remember the clock speed, but I'm sure it was less than 1 MHz.

      The real chips that were used in many projects were the later 8080 and Motorola 6800 (and the 6502 copy of it in the days before hefty lawsuits).

  • Standby for . . . (Score:4, Funny)

    by Brahmastra ( 685988 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @01:31PM (#7056248)
    . . . all the "I used to travel 5 miles in snow, uphill both ways to buy a 500 byte floppy drive to install in a 1 Hz system"

    • OK, I'll oblige... (Score:5, Funny)

      by djh101010 ( 656795 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @01:39PM (#7056306) Homepage Journal
      Why, we didn't even have software, we had to build our own out of zeros and ones. Sometimes we didn't even have ones, so we had to use an "L" and cut the leg off it. Ah, but you tell kids these days, and they just don't understand...
      • At least you had one's and zeros!

        We had to arrange clusters of single-bead abacuses with gears, wires, and pulleys, into simple logic gates, and tip the first gear by hand to get it started. Then it took us days to decipher the results and figure out if our program worked correctly.

        Ah, but we had it rough...

      • I mean, when you cut the legs of the L you have one and a half "1"'s. So it's not like it was THAT much work. Sheesh!

        Besides, back then people only expected programs that you could write with several 1's and 0's. Nowadays they all want God in a box for a nickel! There are a lot of days at work when I'm in yet another day long process review meeting that sawing legs of the "L" seems like some kind of nirvana. You "L" sawers had it easy man!

        Oh, to return to the days of 0's and L's and a sturdy saw at m

  • Altair 8800 first "buyable" PC in 1975 (Score:3, Informative)

    by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @01:49PM (#7056374)
    The Altair 8800, Jan 1975, is considered the first PC built for the hobby market. Before that hobbyists would hack PDP/8s or other minis. These minis cost a good fraction of year's salary at the time. The other approach- which I tried- was build your own microcomputer: add a keybad, keybaord, tape punch, BIOS, TV, etc.

    The first Altair just had dip switches and LEDs for the data and address register. People then added tape punches, keypads, keyboards, TV, etc. Someone Harvard dropout even wrote a BASIC in assembly language that was tape-punched in.

    The first "full PC" with a monitor, keyboard, and OS was Radio Shack's TR-80. At thei time I deplored: "Whats the world coming to when people can even build their own PCs anymore?"

    These events are fairly accurately recorded, though simplified, in Mark Stephen's documentary "Revenge of the Nerds; Part 1". Also in Stephen Levy's "Hackers" gave more of a an east coast perspective.
    • > The first "full PC" with a monitor, keyboard, and OS was Radio Shack's TR-80. At thei time I deplored: "Whats the world coming to when people can even build their own PCs anymore?"

      I will have to disagree with that. The TRS-80 Microcomputer System (aka Model 1) came out in August of 1977. Both the Apple 2 (which hooked up to a TV) and the PET 2001 (which had a built-in monitor, keyboard, and tape deck) were unveiled in April 1977.

      The TRS-80 probably holds the record for the first mass-marketted gene

  • the first? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Blob Pet ( 86206 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @01:53PM (#7056407) Homepage
    That might depend on what your definition of a PC is. This site [blinkenlights.com] might beg to differ.

  • Perty picture (Score:5, Informative)

    by pavon ( 30274 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @01:53PM (#7056408)
    In case you were wondering what it looked like [yorku.ca]
    • Hmmm... the author of this article doesn't seem so sure about the Canadian's ability to create such a machine. Just look at the sarcastic tone of this sentence:

      The seminar, sponsored by the Department of Computer Science, will be a held in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the unveiling of the world's first portable PC - a Canadian-made MCM/70 microcomputer (right).

  • Emulator, anyone? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Jay Maynard ( 54798 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @01:54PM (#7056417) Homepage
    Is the software on this thing available anywhere? An emulator would be neat...the 8008 would be pretty simple to emulate, and the rest is even easier.

  • first PORTABLE pc (Score:4, Interesting)

    by I8TheWorm ( 645702 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @02:05PM (#7056533) Journal
    This site [yorku.ca] just says it was the first portable pc.

  • Xerox Alto (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BanjoBob ( 686644 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @02:05PM (#7056539) Homepage Journal
    I know that in the late 60's Xerox PARC was working on what later became the Alto Personal Computer. This computer, introduced outside of Xerox in 1973 had a GUI, mouse, many programming languages (fortran, interlisp, MESA, BCPL, etc.) and a number of very advanced tools. It had ethernet (3 Mbit PUP net) and later even supported color. Having wet my teeth on the Alto, I still feel that it was better in many respects than the early PCs. It was a totally TTL machine using 74181 Bit-Slice processor chips. Ah, the good ole dayz.

    • Re:Xerox Alto (Score:2, Informative)

      by waldo2020 ( 592242 )
      ahem.. 74181s are only ALUs, ie they perform only logical & arithmetic functions... they have no latches, no registers, ram etc. the common bit slive chip of the era was the AMD2901 fom the 2900 family...

  • The PDP-8 from DEC (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Mikkeles ( 698461 )
    is actually, IMHO, the first personal computer and was introduced in March of 1965, predating the MCM by about 8 years. Here [comm.sfu.ca] is one on a desktop (with dual floppies! woohoo!).

    This was the first computer I got to use hands on (the language being FOCAL and one had to toggle in the bootstrapping code). It sure beat handing in cards for the 360!

    A good starting point to read more is here [uiowa.edu]

    • IIRC, though, the definition of a microcomputer includes that it must utilize a microprocessor - which wasn't invented until '71 (the Intel 4004).

      As to PC, it all depends on who you ask, as the Wintel crowd insists a PC must use an Intel or compatable proc. Accroding to that argument, Apples/Mac's, SPARC/Alpha/etc. workstations, and other non-Intel compatibles are micros but not PC's. The MCM/70 used an Intel 8008, so even Wintel bigots consider that a PC.

      The PDP-8 would probably be considered a mini,

      • I would actually consider a PC to be anything that uses a proc out of the 8088 or 8086 family. The reason behind this is that it was called the IBM PC. Therefore PC's are boxes that are compatible with the PC. Now if you just are talking about personal computers Apples/Mac's, SPARC/Alpha/etc are all valid.
  • Hey, I used to know APL! I even wrote a 3D maze game in it. That's back when I was in High School and they had that funny idea that it was the language of the future, because some government agencies were using it.

    Very powerful syntax, but a bit arcane, IIRC.

  • APL, eh? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Back in 1970 I spent some time in a university group that had a desk-sized underpowered oddity called an IBM 1130. It was built using the same technology as the early System/360 machines, and seemed to have been a pilot for a small business and/or scientific machine as an alternative for mainframes: it had a modified Selectric(tm) typewriter mechanism for interactive IO, and a choice of basic peripherals - paper tape, punched cards, line printers, even mass storage! (10MB plug-in-the-slot cartridges about 1

    • Ah APL

      My first and only programming language in 3rd year High School. We would fill in mark-sense cards with our HB pencils and send them off to the South Australian Education Department's Angle Park computer facility. A week later we found out if we got the syntax corect and, if the program was simple enough, correct output.

    • Back in 1970 I spent some time in a university group that had a desk-sized underpowered oddity called an IBM 1130.

      I remember the 1130 16-bit machine and its Fortran, and a very funny feature.

      Seems that with this computer that memory accesses created static on an AM radio. Someone (probably a /. geek if there had been /. at the time) determined that based on memory access intervals he could create notes. We got a card deck of the source code and several data decks for various songs, all of which were c

  • Motorola was making microcomputors based on the 6800 series as early as 1973. That was the year I first saw one. I am not sure of the name at that time, but later 6809 systems were marketed under the name ExorCiser or something simular.
  • The MCM was a little-known machine in its day. I was following the birth of the micro as it happened; I have a few copies of Byte Magazine #1 (July, 1975) to prove it. Nobody in that circle ever heard of MCM, I suspect.

    The Scelbi 8-H (1974) was often considered the first hacker microcomputer; here's a picture: http://online.sfsu.edu/~hl/c.Scelbi8H.html . It was $580, though by itself it did little. It used the 8008. Very few were made. In early 1975, MITS came out with the Altair 8800, using the Inte
    • "The MCM was a little-known machine in its day. I was following the birth of the micro as it happened; I have a few copies of Byte Magazine #1 (July, 1975) to prove it. Nobody in that circle ever heard of MCM, I suspect."

      Oh, holy sweet Jesus on a stick - the arrogance of my countryman is galactic in it's scope. "I never heard of it, it was in my favorite magazine, so it doesn't matter". Well, here's a quote for you...

      "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy"
  • So where is APL now? Does it exist for Windows? I played around with it a bit in my early computer days and was impressed with its compactness and power -- even though I had to use character triplets to specify many of its operators. Given its uniqueness, I'm surprised that it seemed to drop completely out of the scene, along with a few other languages I once used including: Algol, and PL/1.

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