Over in On the origins of Personal Computing I mentioned the remarkable and unique MCM/70, from 1973, with a one-line display, an 8008 inside, and an APL interpreter as the primary interface and application. And one or two integral cassette drives, used as swap devices as well as filestore, and to which the whole machine state is saved when shutting down… well, the amazing news is that there’s now an emulator for this machine, which includes the ROMs, allowing investigation of what must be a remarkable piece of programming.
Let’s just pause for a video, where we notice that memory is so tight the display memory is used as scratchpad during execution:
To obtain a copy of the emulator, please contact York University Computer museum at
museum at cse.yorku.ca
Having sent my enquiry, I was delighted to get a reply, with an attached tar file, from Zbigniew Stachniak himself, who wrote the book on MCM/70 - see below.
Wow. I hope it made calculating sounds and had blinking lights while it was processing. Imagine doing matrix work on this thing. Obviously, it’s “better than nothing”, but…wow.
The MCM/70 is a great machine that was ahead of it’s time and very much like a mainframe on our desk. The video above is my MCM/70. There is a further video where I type in an APL program for a game of “Horse” shown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YitUfJySYz4
The video’s were actually made to check how close the MCM/70 emulator was to the real computer. Zbigniew was right on.
For the record, no calculating sounds. There was nothing mechanical in it as you will see. However, I did type loudly so the timing could be captured
There was also a talk by a former MCM employee at World of Commodore last year. They did some clever things with that 8008, and interfacing with the fearsome Burroughs Self-Scan display does not sound like fun at all.
