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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.
They were the first to apply monopolistic business practices to the computer industry, transforming it into the multi-billion dollar industry it is today....
It just happened in the end that Bill Gates was a better monopolist than Jobs.
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
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
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 8008 was basically two 4004s glued together. The 4004 was pretty primitive -- I once used a daisywheel terminal based on that processor, but I don't think it made it into anything general purpose.
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. The better-known 8088-based "first" IBM PC was model number 5150.
-- Alastair