| From: phiscock@ee.ryerson.ca | If it had a BASIC interpreter, it might have done better. It had a one-line (plasma) display. APL is definitely the right choice if you can only see one line of a program at once. | And a power | supply that didn't catch fire ;). Fairly crucial. The article doesn't mention minicomputers. They were in their hayday when the MCM/70 came out. Comparing it to mainframes is really unfortunate. The MCM/70 was an unbelievable proof-of-concept. The 8008 was such a miserable processor that it is astonishing that APL would fit. The box was not Good Enough for me at the time. But that doesn't veto success: neither were the Altair 8080 nor the Apple II were good enough, but the hunger was great enough that a market was created and the products quickly evolved. Too bad the MCM/70 didn't catch such a wave. (Altair power supplies were horrible too. My Altair works because I stuck an pop-can-sized capacitor from Active Surplus on it with alligator clips (you can tell that I'm a software guy).) No copies of York APL are known to exist. I once had a listing that I was using as scrap paper. I couldn't find it by the time I found out about this problem. York's Zbigniew Stachniak (mentioned in the article) has a museum at York and hosted several interesting talks. I haven't heard of any recently -- I've probably fallen off the mailing list.