Slashdot Mirror
30th Anniversary of the Microcomputer
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.
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.
Given that God is infinite, and the Universe is also infinite, would you like some toast?
In case you were wondering what it looked like
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 it was developed not by Intel but by CTC themselves, for use in the Datapoint 2200, 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 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 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 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.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
My very first job (at age 16) was programming business and accounting applications for an Altair 8800b. Summer of '77. The little computer tracked inventory, payroll, and did job costing for a cable manufacturing company with about 50 employees. It also sent assorted reports back to a corporate mainframe.
Believe me, at the time, microcomputers were very useful -- but only to those who needed them.
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 Instruments a patent for a version of a microprocessor developed by Gary Boone, an employee. He had filed the patent in 1971.
In 1990, the USPTO granted Gilbert Hyatt a patent on another version of a microprocessor; he had initially filed the patent in 1970. His work pre-dates the work by Hoff and Faggin.
In 1996, the USPTO rescinded the patent granted to Hyatt and designated Gary Boone as the official inventor of the microprocessor. In short, neither Hoff nor Faggin are the first inventors of the microprocessor, yet we in the Slashdot community have heaped undeserved praise on them.
For further information, please read "Micro, Micro: Who Made The Micro?", "1970s -- The Altair/Apple Era", and "Processor Talk".