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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.
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"?
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Sure buddy, blame it on the computer
The Altair was the one true first personal computer, I will not submit to this blasphemy!
*proceeding to read the article*...
.: Max Romantschuk
Just goes to show that Canada *did* contribute to the computer industry before Bioware cropped up :)
Peter M. Dodge,
Chief Executive Officer,
LiquidFire Studios
Platinum Linux - www.
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!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The computer, brought to you by the same country that brought you Hockey, beer, and cheap healthcare, the staples of American life!
Children in the backseats don't cause accidents. Accidents in the back seats cause children.
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
My Minivac 601 could play tictactoe using its six relays. Fortysecond anniversary approaching...
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.
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?
. . . 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"
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...
Back then I did have an IBM-165 which I shared with the rest of the corporation on weekdays, but Sundays from 8AM-4PM it was mine and mine alone.
Yet I lusted after something like the MCM/70.It wasn't until 1979 that I could afford a micro, so you could say that I lusted my way through most of the '70s. ;)
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
But... That was in 1981! As usual, IBM slept right through the personal computer revolution, but then caught up quite well. Seeing the sentence
in 1979, everyone would have laughed out loud.There actually was something like a personal computer from IBM before the PC, a thingy called IBM 5120 with two 8" diskette drives and either BASIC or APL as programming language.
Seems APL was popular them, even though you needed a special keyboard.
You mean in Saskatchewan?
Where the wheat boards monopolize YOU!
Oh, wait... that's right. Heh.
The way I see it you have two options.
The first is to grow six more fingers. This is the prefered method.
The second is to implement the Tom Lehrer approach, because base 8 is just like base 10 really. . . if you're missing two fingers.
Got bandsaw?
KFG
One
Two
Three
*censored*
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.
That might depend on what your definition of a PC is. This site might beg to differ.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
In case you were wondering what it looked like
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
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.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Back then binary coded decimal (BCD) was common. It wasted memory space, but at least displaying values was easy.
This site just says it was the first portable pc.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
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.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
> You're in violation of our Trademark!
Yeah, but a Canadian trademark is only worth about 2/3 of an American trademark, right? And since possession is 9/10ths of the law and pi*(r^2), I see your E and raise you mc^2.
> The GRU will visit you shortly...
Is GRU Canadian spelling for Grue? I don't like that sound of that...
Apple had the closed architecture,
Uh, no. At the time Apple's hot seller was still the Apple II, a very open architecture machine. The closed-architecture Mac didn't come out until the IBM PC had been around for several years.
Both Apple and IBM used proprietary ROMs in their machines -- Compaq reverse-engineered IBMs, and there was a brief market in Apple II clones (both name brands like Franklin and do-it-yourself clones starting from an empty circuit board and a bag of chips) until Apple clamped down on the bootleg (EP)ROM supply.
(I built an Apple II clone -- pretty easy given the 1 MHz clock (easy tolerances) and stock TTL parts. Mostly just soldering in dozens of chip sockets -- and using a scope to debug minor problems like putting a couple of transistors in backwards...oops.)
As for Gates and Microsoft -- yeah, they were supplying variations of their BASIC interpreter to all the hardware manufacturers (they got that lesson down early), and managed to cut a deal with IBM that let them independently market PC-DOS (as MS-DOS).
-- Alastair
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
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
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.
Closer, but still no cigar.
The 8088 was not a cheaper version of the 8086. It was a version of the 8086 that used an 8-bit external bus so that it could be easily retrofitted into existing 8-bit systems which, back then, tended to have a passive backplane (like S100) and plug-in cards for RAM, CPU, serial port, diskette controller, etc. The thought was that designers would come up with new CPU cards and keep all of their existing investment in 8-bit hardware (Compupro, for instance, had an 85/88 CPU card which included an 8085 and an 8088). IBM elected (stupidly) to use the 8088 in a new design to save some pittance on external components (buffers, latches, etc.). As a result, the PC was about 40% slower than it would have been had it been designed with the 8086.
-celine dion
-bryan adams
thanks a lot, you hosers.
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 15 inches across, no kidding.) Ran an early version of RPG and Fortran II (yep, not even IV which was standard by that time). In other words, it was already a relic that had been overtaken by events, but I did at least get a thorough grounding in assembly programming from it.
Anyway, one of the slot-in cartridges had a stand-alone bootable APL system, so I got to play with that a bit. Very interesting language, you could do amazing things with just a single statement provided you could conceive the work in terms of vectors and matrices, and it prototyped Perl's write-only characteristics at a time that Larry Wall must still have been in diapers.
I'm impressed that the MCM/70 got an APL implementation into a transportable box with no more than a tape cartridge for storage, but the language was already seen a dead-end at that time, even in its extended mainframe implementations. Or perhaps it would be better to say a language for a very restricted range of applications: for "real" work you used Fortran or COBOL and RPG. Or, at the micro end that came along at about the same time, Basic, Visicalc, WordStar, etc.
I'm not nostalgic for the technology of that age. Honest.
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".
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.
A Good Intro to NetBS